Outrageous...

The more that comes out, the more incensed I become over the way things have been run.
In the past I have put a concerted effort into listening to views and arguments OTHER than what I've felt. I wanted to understand and wanted to believe that my President and his administration would listen and heed all the information available and make any decisions based on the opinions of those whose job it is to analyze myriads of pieces of intelligence.
I had been consistently told that the US was lied to by Iraqis who promised that they wanted freedom from the oppression of Sadam, and that all they wanted was the opportunity. It was frequently argued to me that the way things worked out could not have been foreseen. my initial response to that has been surprise that our intelligence community would not feel that there was a strong possibility of sectarian violence, leading to infighting and possibly civil war.

As more and more time has gone by I have been increasingly disillusioned and angered by the statements by the President and his people ... and wonder how so many Americans have been willing to accept being spoken to as if we were totally unintelligent.

And now I read that these possibilities, in fact, WERE among the things that the administration was told.

Words cannot express my anger at the way Mr. Bush and his administration have acted on our behalf. HOW has the Iraq situation aided his 'war on terror'? Last week, he even declassified some specific pieces of intelligence in order to use it as "evidence" that al-Queda used the degradation of civility in Iraq to try to set up an operations base there. It smacked once again of manipulation for his public relations agenda. How could it be that someone uses the result of poor war performance to bolster his reasoning of why we should be there. We CAUSED it! It wouldn't have happened if we hadn't created a vacuum there.

Was Sadam any kind of a good guy? Of course not. He did horrific things. But we as a people were lead into this conflict through hand-picked, manipulated reasoning.

And we now find out that specific predictions of what became reality WERE provided ... but ignored.

How has this been intelligent, wise, prudent behavior and leadership?

This Is MY opinion, and I am tired of having to listen to people say that I just don't understand and that we weren't lied to in order to forward a terrible agenda and plan.

For God's sake, they TOLD HIM that this is exactly what might happen!!!

From US News & World Report's Daily Overview:
This weekend it was also learned that the US intelligence community had warned president Bush that an invasion of Iraq could lead to exactly the type of sectarian violence that has plagued Iraq since 2003. On Friday night, NBC Nightly News led off reporting, "We are only now learning that the Bush Administration was warned by the US intelligence community four years ago that Iraq could unravel and turn disastrous no matter how quick, no matter how successful the initial invasion had been. This is all in a rather damning new report on Iraq by the Senate Intelligence Committee." According to a front-page article in Saturday's Washington Post, "Months before the invasion of Iraq, U.S. intelligence agencies predicted that it would be likely to spark violent sectarian divides and provide al-Qaeda with new opportunities in Iraq and Afghanistan. ... Analysts warned that war in Iraq also could provoke Iran to assert its regional influence and 'probably would result in a surge of political Islam and increased funding for terrorist groups' in the Muslim world." The Los Angeles Times, in an article headlined "Spy Warnings On Iraq Turn Out To Be True," said the Senate Intelligence Committee report "brought to light once-classified warnings that accurately forecasted many of the specific military and political problems the Bush administration and Iraqi officials have faced since the invasion in March 2003. The report also details that these warnings were distributed to senior officials with daily access to President Bush and others at the very top of the administration."