Iraq at Risk of Further Strife, Intelligence Report Warns

By Karen DeYoung and Walter Pincus

Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, February 2, 2007; Page A01

A long-awaited National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, presented to President Bush by the intelligence community yesterday, outlines an increasingly perilous situation in which the United States has little control and there is a strong possibility of further deterioration, according to sources familiar with the document.

In a discussion of whether Iraq has reached a state of civil war, the 90-page classified NIE comes to no conclusion and holds out prospects of improvement. But it couches glimmers of optimism in deep uncertainty about whether the Iraqi leaders will be able to transcend sectarian interests and fight against extremists, establish effective national institutions and end rampant corruption.

The document emphasizes that although al-Qaeda activities in Iraq remain a problem, they have been surpassed by Iraqi-on-Iraqi violence as the primary source of conflict and the most immediate threat to U.S. goals. Iran, which the administration has charged with supplying and directing Iraqi extremists, is mentioned but is not a focus.

Completion of the estimate, which projects events in Iraq over the next 18 months, comes amid intensifying debate and skepticism on Capitol Hill about the administration's war policy. In a series of contentious hearings over the past two weeks, legislators have sharply questioned Bush's new plan for the deployment of 21,500 additional U.S. troops and the administration's dependence on the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

In acid remarks yesterday to Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the departing U.S. commander in Iraq, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) noted that "things have gotten markedly and progressively worse" during Casey's 2 1/2 -year tenure, "and the situation in Iraq can now best be described as dire and deteriorating. I regret that our window of opportunity to reverse momentum may be closing." Casey was appearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee on his nomination to be Army chief of staff.

Although McCain supports the additional troop deployments, he has proposed a Senate resolution including stringent benchmarks to gauge the progress of the Iraqi government and military. McCain's resolution and other nonbinding, bipartisan proposals that would express varying degrees of disapproval of Bush's plan will be debated on the Senate floor next week.

Legislators have been equally critical of the intelligence community, repeatedly recalling that most of the key judgments in the October 2002 NIE on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction were wrong. That assessment concluded that Saddam Hussein had amassed chemical and biological weapons and was "reconstituting" his nuclear weapons program. It became the foundation of the Bush administration's case -- and congressional authorization -- for invading Iraq.

"One of the sort of deeply held rumors around here is that the intelligence community gives an administration or a president what he wants by way of intelligence," Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) told Navy Vice Adm. John M. McConnell, Bush's nominee to be director of national intelligence, during McConnell's confirmation hearing yesterday.

Without directly accepting Feinstein's premise, McConnell replied that the intelligence community had learned "meaningful" lessons over the past several years and that "there's very intense focus on independence." McConnell and others made clear that the new NIE on Iraq had been subjected to extensive competitive analysis to test its conclusions.

One senior congressional aide said the NIE had been described to him as "unpleasant but very detailed." A source familiar with its language said it contained several dissents that are prominently displayed so that policymakers understand any disagreements within the intelligence community -- a significant change from the 2002 document, which listed most key dissents in small-type footnotes.

Sen. Christopher S. Bond (R-Mo.), vice chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, pointedly told McConnell that "we are not going to accept national security issue judgment[s] without examining the intelligence underlying the judgments, and I believe this committee has an obligation to perform due diligence on such important documents." Previous committee attempts to obtain material to back up a 2005 NIE on Iran, Bond said, had "run into resistance."

The outgoing director of national intelligence, John D. Negroponte, briefed the president on the Iraq NIE yesterday, and the document will be made available to Congress early today. A two-page declassified version of its key judgments will then be posted on the DNI Web site.

Sources familiar with the closely held estimate agreed to discuss it in general terms yesterday on the condition that they remain anonymous and not be directly quoted. But Negroponte and others in the intelligence community have made frequent references to its conclusions in recent testimony.

On Tuesday, Negroponte referred to the NIE in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. "Iraq is at a precarious juncture. That means the situation could deteriorate, but there are prospects for increasing stability" that depend on the commitment of Iraqi government and political leaders to take steps to end Sunni-Shiite violence and "the willingness of Iraqi security forces to pursue extremist elements of all kinds," he said.

Congress, which requested the Iraq NIE last August, has pressured the intelligence community to complete it in time for consideration of Bush's new strategy. Intelligence officials have insisted that their best experts were working on the project at the same time they were meeting the demands of policymakers for current intelligence reports.

NIEs comprise input from across the community and are written by the National Intelligence Council.

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With Iran Ascendant, U.S. Is Seen at Fault

By Anthony Shadid
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, January 30, 2007; Page A01

Arab Allies in Region Feeling Pressure

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates -- Kuwait rarely rebuffs its ally, the United States, partly out of gratitude for the 1991 Persian Gulf War. But in October it reneged on a pledge to send three military observers to an American-led naval exercise in the Gulf, according to U.S. officials and Kuwaiti analysts.

"We understood," a State Department official said. "The Kuwaitis were being careful not to antagonize the Iranians."

Four years after the United States invaded Iraq, in part to transform the Middle East, Iran is ascendant, many in the region view the Americans in retreat, and Arab countries, their own feelings of weakness accentuated, are awash in sharpening sectarian currents that many blame the United States for exacerbating.

Iran has deepened its relationship with Palestinian Islamic groups, assuming a financial role once filled by Gulf Arab states, in moves it sees as defensive and the United States views as aggressive. In Lebanon and Iraq, Iran is fighting proxy battles against the United States with funds, arms and ideology. And in the vacuum created by the U.S. overthrow of Iranian foes in Afghanistan and Iraq, it is exerting a power and prestige that recalls the heady days of the 1979 Islamic revolution, when Iranian clerics led the toppling of a U.S.-backed government.

"The United States is the first to be blamed for the rise of Iranian influence in the Middle East," said Khaled al-Dakhil, a Saudi writer and academic. "There is one thing important about the ascendance of Iran here. It does not reflect a real change in Iranian capabilities, economic or political. It's more a reflection of the failures on the part of the U.S. and its Arab allies in the region."

Added Eyal Zisser, head of the Middle Eastern and African Studies Department at Tel Aviv University in Israel: "After the whole investment in democracy in the region, the West is losing, and Iran is winning."

The United States has signaled a more aggressive posture toward Iran. President Bush on Friday defended a Pentagon program to kill or capture Iranian operatives in Iraq. Vice President Cheney, in a Newsweek interview published Sunday, said the deployment of a second U.S. aircraft carrier task force to the Persian Gulf was intended to signal to the region that the United States is "working with friends and allies as well as the international organizations to deal with the Iranian threat."

And John D. Negroponte, outgoing director of national intelligence, told Congress this month that Iran's influence is growing across the region "in ways that go beyond the menace of its nuclear program."

Widespread Support

---

Iranian officials -- emboldened but uneasy over nuclear-armed neighbors in Israel and Pakistan and a U.S. military presence in the Gulf, Iraq and Afghanistan -- have warned that they would respond to an American attack on Iran's facilities.

"Iran's supporters are widespread -- they're in Iraq, they're in Afghanistan, they're everywhere. And you know, the American soldiers in the Middle East are hostages of Iran, in the situation where a war is imposed on it. They're literally in the hands of the Iranians," said Najaf Ali Mirzai, a former Iranian diplomat in Beirut who heads the Civilization Center for Iranian-Arab Studies. "The Iranians can target them wherever, and Patriot missiles aren't going to defend them and neither is anything else."

"Iran would suffer," he added, "but America would suffer more."

As that struggle deepens, many in the Arab world find themselves on the sidelines. They are increasingly anxious over worsening tension between Sunni and Shiite Muslims across the Middle East, even as some accuse the United States of stoking that tension as a way to counter predominantly Shiite Iran. Fear of Iranian dominance is coupled, sometimes in the same conversation, with suspicion of U.S. intentions in confronting Iran.

"It was necessary to create an enemy to justify the failure of the American occupation in Iraq," Talal Salman, the editor-in-chief of as-Safir, a Lebanese newspaper, wrote in a column this month. "So to protect ourselves against the coming of the wolf, we bring the foreign fleets that fill our lands, skies and seas."

Iranian rivalry with its Sunni Arab neighbors is centuries old, but as with most conflicts in the Middle East, its modern contours are shaped by politics and interests.

Iran has found itself strengthened almost by default, first with the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan to Iran's east, which ousted the Taliban rulers against whom it almost went to war in the 1990s, and then to its west, with the American ouster of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, against whom it fought an eight-year war in the 1980s.

Arab rulers allied with the United States issued stark warnings. Jordan's King Abdullah in 2005 spoke darkly of a Shiite crescent that would stretch from Iran, through Iraq's Shiite Arab majority, to Lebanon, where Shiites make up the largest single community. President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt suggested last year that Shiites in the Arab world were more loyal to Iran than to their own countries. And in a rare interview, published Saturday, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia suggested that Iran, although he did not name the country, was trying to convert Sunni Arabs to Shiism. "The majority of Sunni Muslims will never change their faith," he told al-Siyassah, a Kuwaiti newspaper.

Across the region, Iran has begun to exert influence on fronts as diverse as its allies: the formerly exiled Shiite parties in Iraq and their militias; Hezbollah, a Lebanese group formed with Iranian patronage after Israel's 1982 invasion; and the cash-strapped Sunni Muslim movement of Hamas in the Palestinian territories.

"I disagree with Iranian policy, but you have to give the Iranians credit," said Abdullah al-Shayji, a political science professor and head of Kuwait University's American Studies Unit. "You have to appreciate that they have an agenda, they're planning for it, they seize the opportunity, they see an American weakness and they are capitalizing on it."

A Helping Hand

---

In Beirut's southern suburbs, a Hezbollah stronghold, a banner hangs near a bridge wrecked by Israeli strikes last summer: "The Zionist enemy destroys, the Islamic Republic of Iran builds." Even before the 33-day war ended, Iran had provided Hezbollah with $150 million to begin rebuilding, some of it going to victims in $10,000 bundles of crisp U.S. currency, according to a Shiite politician who spoke on condition of anonymity.

"You want me to give you my opinion? Honestly?" asked Hajj Hassan Sbeiti, a 44-year-old merchant, his face breaking into a wry smile. "If you say hello to me, you probably like me. If you say hello to me and ask what I need, you're a friend. If you say hello to me, ask what I need and put money in my hand, then you're going to be my brother."

In Iraq, U.S. officials say Iran is providing Shiite militias with sophisticated projectiles capable of penetrating U.S. armored vehicles and backing those forces in a gathering civil war against Sunni Arabs. One commander of the Mahdi Army, a Shiite militia that U.S. military officials now identify as the greatest security threat in Iraq, said that however much he might dislike Iran, he was eagerly anticipating the delivery of 50 rocket-propelled grenades to Basra.

But no less influential are the ties that Iran has deepened with the three main Shiite groups in Iraq, some of whose leaders spent years in exile in Iran and are now nominally allied with the United States, and the burgeoning economic relationship between the two countries.

The extent of Iran's engagement in the Arab world, and the rising sectarianism that has accompanied the Iranian ascendance, troubles Arabs who already worry about growing tension between the United States and Iran.

"If Iran is bombed, Iran's reaction is a sure thing. They cannot sit idle, and what kind of reaction they will take is a big question," said Abbas Bolurfrushan, the president of the Iranian Business Council in Dubai, a booming city-state on the Gulf that is part of the United Arab Emirates, where an estimated 400,000 Iranians live and work.

Mirzai, the former Iranian diplomat, offered a similar scenario in more threatening terms. Wearing a white turban and the robes of a cleric, he sketched out potential Iranian responses: cutting the Strait of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf, through which 20 percent of the world's oil passes; retaliation in Iraq, Afghanistan or Lebanon; attacks on U.S. targets in the Gulf.

"There is a policy the Iranians have and they've repeated it often -- the Gulf is either safe for everyone or no one," he said.

In an attempt to contest Iran's influence, the United States has sought to form an axis among Sunni Arab states it considers moderate: Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and smaller countries in the Gulf. Israeli officials have spoken about a possible alignment of their country's interests with those states to arrest both Iran's influence and its nuclear program.

In November, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said he would try to deepen ties with those states, some of which have yet to recognize Israel, in what Israeli analysts saw as an opening bid to create an anti-Iranian bloc.

But Zisser, of Tel Aviv University, cautioned that "all of these countries are not very strong, and they have their own problems."

"Iran's threat could do something to bring them together, but I would say that any alliance that comes out of it would be defensive in nature," he said. "These countries are not going to be able to unite in any way that would meaningfully change the face of the Middle East."

Potentially more far-reaching is the sectarian tension that the struggle has ignited. In the Palestinian territories, Israeli officials say, Iran has been increasingly successful in influencing the chaotic political situation, particularly by funding the Hamas-led government.

The connection has not gone unnoticed in the Palestinian street. At two rallies this month for Fatah, the movement led by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, crowds directed chants at Hamas, a Sunni Arab group. "Shiites, Shiites," they shouted.

Across the Middle East, once antiquated words have sprung up in conversations about Shiites -- Safawis, for instance, drawn from the name of a Persian empire that brought Shiism to Iran. In Lebanon, posters have gone up in Sunni neighborhoods portraying leaders united by little other than their Sunni sectarian affiliation: Saddam Hussein, Yasser Arafat, Rafiq al-Hariri, the former Lebanese prime minister killed in a 2005 car bombing, and Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the leader of Hamas who was assassinated by Israel in 2004.

"You are in heaven," the poster reads, "and those who killed you will go to hell."

Iranian officials have repeatedly warned against the phenomenon, fearing it will curb their leverage in an Arab street that remains majority Sunni. Many in the Arab world watch its gathering force with a sense of helplessness.

"It's very bleak and it's very dangerous," said Dakhil, the Saudi writer. "We have a sectarian civil war in Iraq now and this is drawing sectarian lines through the region. This is the most important, the most dangerous ramification of the American war in Iraq."

Correspondent Scott Wilson in Jerusalem contributed to this report.

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Petraeus on Vietnam's Legacy

Sunday, January 14, 2007; Page B04

The Washington Post

Among Lt. Gen. David H. Petraeus's qualifications for the post of senior U.S. military commander in Iraq is his work training Iraqi security forces, as well as his oversight of the Army and Marine Corps' updated counterinsurgency field manual. But another document may prove useful to Petraeus in Iraq. In 1987, he earned a PhD from Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School with a 328-page thesis titled "The American Military and the Lessons of Vietnam: A Study of Military Influence and the Use of Force in the Post-Vietnam Era." Excerpts below.

-- Rachel Dry

Historical analogies are particularly compelling during crises, when the tendency to supplement incomplete information with past experiences is especially marked. . . . The legacy of Vietnam is unlikely to soon recede as an important influence on America's senior military. The frustrations of Vietnam are too deeply etched in the minds of those who now the [sic] lead the services and combatant commands. . . .

Vietnam cost the military dearly. It left America's military leaders confounded, dismayed, and discouraged. Even worse, it devastated the armed forces, robbing them of dignity, money, and qualified people for a decade. . . . While the psychic scars of the war may be deepest among the Army and Marine Corps leadership, however, the senior leaders of all the services share a similar reaction to Vietnam. There is no desire among any of them to repeat the experience that provided the material for such descriptively titled books as: "Defeated: Inside America's Military Machine"; "Self Destruction: the Disintegration and Decay of the United States Army During the Vietnam Era"; and "Crisis in Command: Mismanagement in the United States Army." The simple essence of this feeling is that, in the words of then Colonel Dave Palmer, "there must be no more Vietnams."

On war and public opinion

Vietnam was an extremely painful reminder that when it comes to intervention, time and patience are not American virtues in abundant supply. . . .

he military want to avoid what former Army Chief of Staff E.C. Meyer termed the Vietnam mistake of "putting soldiers out at the end of a string" without the full support of the American people. Since time is crucial, furthermore, sufficient force must be used at the outset to ensure that the conflict can be resolved before the American people withdraw their support for it. Nothing succeeds with the American public like success, the military realize; the sooner the mission is accomplished, the better.

On fighting insurgencies

Vietnam planted in the minds of many in the military doubts about the ability of U.S. forces to conduct successful large-scale counterinsurgencies. These misgivings do not in all cases spring from doubts about the capabilities of American troops and units per se. . . .

Rather, the doubts that are part of the Vietnam legacy spring from a number of interrelated factors: the previously noted worries about a lack of popular support for what the public might perceive as ambiguous conflicts; suspicions about the willingness of civilian policy-makers -- not just those in the executive branch -- to stay the course; and lurking fears that the respective services have yet to come to grips with the difficult tasks of developing the doctrine, equipment, and forces suitable for nasty "little" wars. . . .

Others, who believe that the U.S. could develop suitable American forces for counterinsurgency operations, have doubts about the existing capabilities of U.S. units in this area. As one U.S. officer put it, "I submit that the U.S. Army does not have the mind-set for combat operations where the key terrain is the mind, not the high ground. We do not take the time to understand the nature of the society in which we are fighting, the government we are supporting, or the enemy we are fighting."

On civilian officials

Very importantly, many in the military believe that the United States armed forces can win small wars if allowed to do so. Those who hold this view tend to believe that Vietnam was less an illustration of the limitations of American military power than an example of what happens if that power is limited and not used to best advantage. This feeling springs from conviction that the U.S. military in Vietnam were so hemmed in by restrictions that they could not accomplish their mission. The lesson for those of this persuasion, therefore, is that the military must be given a freer hand in future military operations. Even among the most fervent believers in this logic, however, there is a new recognition that the world is more intractable, and intervention with U.S. troops more problematic. . . .

The military also took from Vietnam (and the concomitant activities in the Pentagon) a heightened awareness that civilian officials are responsive to influences other than the objective conditions on the battlefield. A consequence has been an increase in the traditional military distrust of civilian political leaders. . . . While the military still accept emphatically the constitutional provision for civilian control of the armed forces, there remain from the Vietnam era nagging doubts about the abilities and motivations of politicians and those they appoint to key positions. Vietnam was a painful reminder for the military that they, not the transient occupants of high office, generally bear the heaviest burden during armed conflict.


On dealing with the President

The lessons taken from Vietnam work to that end; military support for the use of force abroad is contingent on the presence of specific pre-conditions . . . "Don't commit American troops, Mr. President," they hold, "unless:

1) You really have to (in which case, presumably, vital U.S. interests are at stake);

2) You have established clear-cut, attainable military objectives for American military forces (that is, more than just some fuzzy political goals).

3) You provide the military commander sufficient forces and the freedom necessary to accomplish his mission swiftly. (Remember, Mr. President, this may necessitate the mobilization of the reserve components -- perhaps even a declaration of war.)

4) You can ensure sufficient public support to permit carrying the commitment through to its conclusion."

For the military, in short, the debate over how and when to commit American troops abroad has become a debate over how to avoid, at all costs, another Vietnam.

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