Left I on the News

Not so much:

The U.S. intelligence community accurately predicted months before the Iraq war that al-Qaeda would link up with elements from former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's regime and militant Islamists to conduct terrorist attacks against U.S. forces in that country, according to a report released today by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

Two national intelligence assessments sent to the White House and other senior Bush administration policymakers in January 2003 also predicted that al-Qaeda "would try to take advantage of U.S. attention on postwar Iraq to re-establish its presence in Afghanistan," according to the Senate report.

The long-awaited section of the committee's so-called Phase II report, which covers the pre-war intelligence assessments of what conditions would be like after the conflict in Iraq, also said that Iran would seek to influence a post-war Iraq to protect its own security interests and to demonstrate its importance as a regional actor. The assessments also said that "elements" within the Iranian government might aggressively counter the United States in Iraq by using Shiite and Kurdish contacts "to sow dissent against the U.S. presence and complicate the formation of a new, pro-U.S. Iraqi government."

Occupation of Iraq by the United States, "probably would boost proponents of political Islam" and "funds for terrorist groups probably would increase as a result of Muslim outrage over U.S. actions," the assessments predicted.

In the economic field, the analysts predicted that "cuts in electricity or looting of distribution networks would have a cascading disastrous impact" and that large amounts of outside assistance would be needed to provide basic services, such as water and sanitation, in Iraq.

Hey, look over there! New books about Hillary Clinton's sex life! Thank God the pundits have something important to talk about!

I could of course make a joke, as Jay Leno and Jon Stewart may well in reaction to this news item, that the "faulty pre-war intelligence" was the "intelligence" of the President reading these reports. Funny, except you all know that, although I do actually think Bush is pretty much a moron, that his lack of intelligence had nothing whatsoever to do with the "mistake" that was made in invading Iraq, since it wasn't a "mistake" at all.