Iraq is making broad economic and political progress, the Bush administration insisted on Thursday, responding to a leaked intelligence report setting out a bleak assessment of Iraq's prospects up to the end of next year.
The report a classified National Intelligence Estimate that represents the collective judgment of the various branches of the US intelligence community was the first known overall assessment of Iraq for two years. It was approved in July by John McLaughlin, acting head of the Central Intelligence Agency, and initiated by George Tenet, his predecessor, who stepped down on July 9.
According to the New York Times, the 50-page report sets out three scenarios, ranging from the most favourable tenuous stability in political, economic and security terms to the worst case, of civil war.
An official told the Financial Times it was also critical of the administration's failure to anticipate the insurgency and widespread looting that followed the collapse of Saddam Hussein's regime.
The White House responded by saying that progress was being made on all fronts of the president's five-point plan for Iraq's economic and political reconstruction, and that elections would go ahead as scheduled in January 2005. President George W. Bush had been clear to the American people that challenges lay ahead, a senior official said.
“The Iraqi people continue to defy the predictions of talking heads, pundits, hand-wringers and nay-sayers,” the official said. The authors of the NIE did not belong to that category of pessimists but were outlining “worst-case scenarios” so that the administration would adopt the correct policies to avoid them, the official said. But he also said the views represented the “collective and learned” judgment of the intelligence community.
Last week the independent Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) released a study that asserted that Iraq's reconstruction efforts were largely stagnating or regressing, in part because of the deteriorating security situation.
Paul Wolfowitz, deputy defence secretary, told Iraqi officials visiting Washington that “extraordinary and difficult” times lay ahead. No one should underestimate the challenges of repairing the 30 years of damage and abuse committed by the old regime, he said.
