A newly
declassified US intelligence memo has been unearthed this week and
featured in a bombshell Wall Street Journal report. It proves
that the year prior to the Bush administration's 2003 invasion of
Iraq the White House was expressly warned in great detail of all that
could and would go wrong in the regime change war's aftermath,
including the Sunni-Shia sectarian chaos and proxy war with Iran that
would define Iraq and the whole region for years following.
And
crucially, it reveals that seven months before the US invasion of
Iraq, American intelligence officials understood that Osama bin Laden
was likely "alive and well and hiding in northwest Pakistan"
— important given that a key Bush admin claim to sell the war was
that Saddam Hussein and bin Laden were "in league"
against the United States.
The July
2002 memo was authored by William Burns, then serving as assistant
secretary of state for near eastern affairs, and though clearly
dismissed by the Bush neocons making the case for war, proved
prescient on many levels. "Following are some very quick and
informal thoughts on how events before, during and after an effort to
overthrow the regime in Baghdad could unravel if we're not careful,
intersecting to create a 'perfect storm' for American interests,"
Burns wrote in the memo, classified 'Secret' and sent to Secretary of
State Colin Powell.
The
classified memo's existence was first brought to the public's
attention through Knight Ridder's reporting in July 2003,
which sought to reveal at the time there were pockets of dissenting
voices in the State Department and intelligence community pushing
back against the absurd White House claim that the whole operation
would be a "cakewalk" and US troops would be greeted
as "liberators". And there's Vice President Dick
Cheney's infamous declaration that the military effort would take
“weeks rather than months.”
Now,
sixteen years after the start of the war the "perfect storm"
intel briefing has been made public in fully redacted form and it
affirms, as the WSJ reports, "Diplomats accurately forecast
many setbacks: sectarian violence, attacks on U.S. troops, Iranian
intervention and long road to structural change." Out of
this came the rise of ISIS and the continued unleashing of regime
change and sectarian chaos on neighboring Syria.
The
ten page memo outlines a litany of catastrophic doom and gloom
scenarios resulting from the invasion which would destabilize not
only Iraq, but unleash sectarian hell on the entire region.
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