Misunderstanding Iraq

It has long been acknowledged that there were intelligence failures in the lead up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, such as the absence of weapons of mass destruction. According to Wayne White, former deputy director of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research's Office of Analysis for the Near East and South Asia, the lack of understanding over Iraq shared by both the government and the public is much more complex and far-reaching.

Speaking at a conference on Iraq held at Georgetown University, White placed some of the responsibility for today's confusion over Iraq on mainstream sources, such as popular articles written by uninformed scholars and military documentaries. White said that these sources led to the widespread neglect of a possible insurgency.

"I saw this in the Iran-Iraq war, warned about it in an assessment to policy makers in the first week of the 2003 war regarding the impending occupation of Sunni Arab areas farther north and was essentially ignored, with one response being from a senior State Department policy maker, 'can somebody go tell Wayne we're winning the war'," said White.

"Even as late as the summer of 2003, when the intelligence community began to craft in reaction to violence a national intelligence estimate on the sources of violence and instability in Iraq...I was the only representative in the room that said we faced a growing insurgency."

White said that there was a number of basic threats that were overlooked in the initial invasion, such as the negative effects of anti U.S. propaganda taught in schools and presented through Arab media. White also noted that there are threats that still have not been addressed, like a conflict between the increasingly powerful Iraqi army and the Iraqi civilian government, which White describes as corrupt and more disconnected from the needs of the people than the army.

"A core problem affecting U.S. intelligence analysis as well as, and even more so, the formulation of U.S. policy since 2003, has been the inability to grasp the full sweep of Iraq's multidimensional societal matrix," said White.