Report: U.S. Planners Underestimated Iraqi Shi'ites
Wed April 23, 2003 02:13 AM ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. officials plotting the future of Iraq underestimated the organizational strength of the Shi'ite majority and are not prepared to prevent the rise of an anti-American, Islamic fundamentalist government, The Washington Post reported on Wednesday.
The newspaper, quoting Bush administration officials, reported that U.S. intelligence reports reaching top officials throughout the government this week said the Shi'ites appear to be much more organized than was thought. Shi'ites make up about 60 percent of the Iraqi population and were oppressed for decades under the rule of ousted President Saddam Hussein.

In a show of political strength, hundreds of thousands of Shi'ite Muslims filled the holy city of Kerbala on Tuesday in a long-banned pilgrimage marked by religious fervor and chants of "Yes to Islam, No to America."

A meeting of generals and admirals at the Pentagon on Monday turned into a spontaneous teach-in on Iraq's Shi'ites and the U.S. strategy for containing Islamic fundamentalism in Iraq, the article said.

U.S. officials said this week that as the administration plotted to overthrow Saddam Hussein's government, too little attention was paid to the dynamics of religion and politics in the region. They also said the administration failed to fully appreciate the force of Shi'ite aspirations and is now concerned that those sentiments could lead to a fundamentalist government, the newspaper reported.

"It is a complex equation, and the U.S. government is ill-equipped to figure out how this is going to shake out," a State Department official told The Washington Post. "I don't think anyone took a step backward and asked, 'What are we looking for?' The focus was on the overthrow of Saddam Hussein."

According to the newspaper, some U.S. intelligence analysts and Iraq experts said they warned the Bush administration before the war about overthrowing Hussein's government without having anything to replace it. But officials told the newspaper the concerns were either not heard or were low on the priority list of postwar planning.

"We're flying blind on this. It's a classic case of politics and intelligence," Walter Lang, a former Defense Intelligence Agency specialist in Middle Eastern affairs, was quoted as saying. "In this case, the policy community have absolutely whipped the intel community, or denigrated it so much."