Bureaucrats say they noticed insurgency early in war

Washington Post:

Days after the United States invaded Iraq, senior U.S. officials were warned that Iraqi Sunnis would strongly resist American troops' occupation efforts, according to testimony given yesterday before Senate Democrats.

Wayne White, a former deputy director in the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, told senators that when British soldiers were forced to repeatedly take the port city of Umm Qasr from Iraqi guerrillas, "I knew then and there that we would have a serious problem on our hands."

"I quickly warned, around the first week or 10 days of the war . . . that this spelled danger as we moved farther north, especially into Iraq's Sunni Arab heartland," White told the Senate Democratic Policy Committee.

The advisory came in a formal bureau assessment that typically goes to senior officials at the State Department.

Noting that a Sunni insurgency began to gather momentum only after conventional fighting ended in May 2003, White said, "My warning was accurate, just a tad premature."

...

A reasonable response to this is "so what." First it was after the war was already underway. Second it is no reason not to liberate Iraq. Too many on the left, and particularly some in the State Department seem to think that when an enemy decides to engage in a raiding strategy and violate the Geneva Convention the US should just surrender and let them get a way with it.

One of the other speakers at this Democrat show trial made the laughable suggestion that Dick Cheney who was Secretary of Defense during the first Gulf War had no middle east experience. What he really meant was he was not part of the State's team of do nothings. Witnesses included the usual suspects of former CIA and State Department employees who have been trying to undercut the war effort and push their losing strategies, i.e. White, Paul Pillar and Lawrence B. Wilkerson.

Pillar had this canard, They also predicted that the occupying forces would become targets and that "war and occupation would boost political Islam, increase sympathy for terrorist objectives and make Iraq a magnet for extremists from elsewhere in the Middle East." In fact US forces are the most trusted in Iraq and the primary targets for the enemy have been non combatants. Pillar is just pushing Murtha's discredited false premise. Sympathy for the terrorist has actually decreased since the war, not only in Iraq but in almost every country in the middle east. Pillar is jsut flat wrong in his analysis.