2+2=4
Knight/Ridder: CIA officers in Iraq are warning that
the country might be on a path to civil war, current
and former U.S. officials said Wednesday, starkly
contradicting the upbeat assessment President Bush
gave in his State of the Union address.
Support Our Troops, Show Up for Democracy in 2004:
Defeat Bush (again!)
http://www.thestate.com/mld/thestate/news/nation/7767102.htm
Posted on Thu, Jan. 22, 2004
CIA warns of civil war in Iraq: In contrast to Bush’s optimism, officers say tensions mounting between Shiites, Kurds...
By WARREN P. STROBEL and JONATHAN S. LANDAY
Knight Ridder Newspapers
WASHINGTON — CIA officers in Iraq are warning that the
country might be on a path to civil war, current and
former U.S. officials said Wednesday, starkly
contradicting the upbeat assessment President Bush
gave in his State of the Union address.
The CIA officers’ bleak assessment was delivered
verbally to Washington this week, said the officials,
who spoke on condition of anonymity.
The warning echoed growing fears that Iraq’s Shiite
majority —which has until now grudgingly accepted the
U.S. occupation — could turn to violence if its
demands for direct elections are spurned.
Meanwhile, Iraq’s Kurdish minority is pressing its
demand for autonomy and shares of oil revenue.
“Both the Shiites and the Kurds think that now’s their
time,” one intelligence officer said. “They think that
if they don’t get what they want now, they’ll probably
never get it. Both of them feel they’ve been betrayed
by the United States before.”
These dire scenarios were discussed at meetings this
week by Bush, his top national security aides and the
chief U.S. administrator in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, a
senior administration official said.
Another senior official said the concerns over a
possible civil war were not confined to the CIA, but
are “broadly held within the government,” including by
regional experts at the State Department and National
Security Council.
Top officials are scrambling to save the U.S. exit
strategy after concluding that Iraq’s most powerful
Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Husseini
al-Sistani, is unlikely to drop his demand for
elections for an interim legislature that would choose
an interim government by June 30.
Bremer would then hand over power to the interim
government.
The CIA hasn’t yet put its officers’ warnings about a
potential Iraqi civil war in writing, but the senior
official said he expected a formal report
“momentarily.”
“In the discussion with Bremer in the last few days,
several very bad possibilities have been outlined,” he
said.
Bush, in his State of the Union address Tuesday,
insisted that an insurgency against the U.S.
occupation — conducted primarily by minority Sunni
Muslims who enjoyed power under Saddam Hussein — “will
fail, and the Iraqi people will live in freedom.”
Bush did not directly address the crisis over the
Shiites’ political demands.
Shiites, who dominate the regions from Baghdad south
to the borders of Kuwait and Iran, make up 60 percent
of Iraq’s 25 million people.
Several U.S. officials acknowledged that al-Sistani is
unlikely to be “rolled,” as one put it, and as a
result Bremer’s plan for restoring Iraqi sovereignty
and ending the U.S. occupation by June 30 is in peril.
The Bremer plan, negotiated with the U.S.-installed
Iraqi Governing Council, calls for caucuses in each of
Iraq’s 18 provinces to choose the interim national
assembly, which would in turn select Iraq’s first
post-Saddam government. The first direct elections
wouldn’t be held until the end of 2005.
Al-Sistani wants the interim assembly chosen through
direct elections.