I've been hunting around for the answer to this question a bit lately. Chomsky did an OK job, responsibly (and more-or-less accurately) warning against a potential death toll rising to the hundreds of thousands. But he seems to have been a bit squishy on the chemical and biological weapons issue, advancing a healthy but not especially focused skepticism about their existence. And I was unable to find predictions of sectarian strife leading to civil war.
Then I came across this excellent posting by Glenn Greenwald, who reminds us of Howard Dean's prewar position:
when one reviews the pre-war arguments made by Howard Dean as to why the war was ill-advised, it is glaringly self-evident just how right he was -- at a time when few others recognized it -- about virtually everything. Here are excerpts from a speech Dean gave on February 17, 2003 -- just over a month before we invaded -- at Drake University which reflects the prescient warnings he was making back then:
[...]
The Administration has not explained how a lasting peace, and lasting security, will be achieved in Iraq once Saddam Hussein is toppled.
I, for one, am not ready to abandon the search for better answers.
[...]
We have been told over and over again what the risks will be if we do not go to war.We have been told little about what the risks will be if we do go to war.
If we go to war, I certainly hope the Administration's assumptions are realized, and the conflict is swift, successful and clean. I certainly hope our armed forces will be welcomed like heroes and liberators in the streets of Baghdad.
I certainly hope Iraq emerges from the war stable, united and democratic.
I certainly hope terrorists around the world conclude it is a mistake to defy America and cease, thereafter, to be terrorists.
It is possible, however, that events could go differently, . . . .
Iraq is a divided country, with Sunni, Shia and Kurdish factions that share both bitter rivalries and access to large quantities of arms.
Anti-American feelings will surely be inflamed among the misguided who choose to see an assault on Iraq as an attack on Islam, or as a means of controlling Iraqi oil.
And last week's tape by Osama bin Laden tells us that our enemies will seek relentlessly to transform a war into a tool for inspiring and recruiting more terrorists.[...] Those who claim that there was nobody before the war who doubted that Saddam Hussein possessed WMDs which compelled our invasion ought to read this passage from Dean's speech:
Now, I am not among those who say that America should never use its armed forces unilaterally. In some circumstances, we have no choice. In Iraq, I would be prepared to go ahead without further Security Council backing if it were clear the threat posed to us by Saddam Hussein was imminent, and could neither be contained nor deterred.
However, that case has not been made, and I believe we should continue the hard work of diplomacy and inspection. . . .
Secretary Powell's recent presentation at the UN showed the extent to which we have Iraq under an audio and visual microscope. Given that, I was impressed not by the vastness of evidence presented by the Secretary, but rather by its sketchiness. . .Can anyone dispute that Dean was right about virtually every prediction and claim he made, every warning that he issued about why invading Iraq was ill-advised and counter-productive? Compare this outright prescience from Dean to the war supporters’ declarations of cakewalks, predictions of glorious victory celebrations, promises that the war would pay for itself, Purple Finger celebrations where they insisted that democracy was upon us, errors regarding the number of troops needed, inexcusable failure to anticipate or plan the insurgency, and shrill fear-mongering about Saddam’s non-existent weapons.
Chalk one up for the left, I was prepared to think -- against the Pentagon's absurd faith-based mums and mints prediction, we in the reality-based community were right on.
Not so fast. I was astounded to come across this (h/t Wolcott):
With Iraq perched at the very precipice of an ethnic and sectarian holocaust, the utter failure of the Bush administration’s policy is revealed with starkest clarity. Iraq may or may not fall into the abyss in the next few days and weeks, but what is no longer in doubt is who is to blame: If Iraq is engulfed in civil war then Americans, Iraqis and the international community must hold President Bush and Vice President Cheney responsible for the destruction of Iraq.
The CIA, the State Department, members of Congress and countless Middle East experts warned Bush and Cheney— to no avail— that toppling Saddam could unleash the demons of civil war. They said so before the war, during it and in the aftermath, and each time the warnings were dismissed. Those warnings came from people like Paul Pillar, the CIA veteran who served as the U.S. intelligence community’s chief Middle East analyst, from Wayne White, the State Department’s chief intelligence analyst on Iraq and from two CIA Baghdad station chiefs who were purged for their analysis. Pillar, who wrote this month in Foreign Affairs that pre-war intelligence on Iraq was distorted by the Bush-Cheney team, is being excoriated by the right.
For the most radical-right neoconservative Jacobins amongst the Bush-Cheney team, the possibility that Iraq might fall apart wasn’t even alarming: they just didn’t care, and in their obsessive zeal to overthrow Saddam Hussein they were more than willing to take the risk. David Wurmser, who migrated from the Israeli-connected Washington Institute on Near East Policy to the American Enterprise Institute to the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans to John Bolton’s arms control shop at the State Department to Dick Cheney’s shadow National Security Council in the Office of the Vice President from 2001 to 2006, wrote during the 1990s that Iraq after Saddam was likely to descend into violent tribal, ethnic and sectarian war.
In a paper for an Israeli think tank, the same think tank for which Wurmser, Richard Perle and Douglas Feith prepared the famous “Clean Break” paper in 1996, Wurmser wrote in 1997 : “The residual unity of the nation is an illusion projected by the extreme repression of the state.” After Saddam, Iraq would “be ripped apart by the politics of warlords, tribes, clans, sects, and key families,” he wrote. “Underneath facades of unity enforced by state repression, [Iraq’s] politics is defined primarily by tribalism, sectarianism, and gang/clan-like competition.” Yet Wurmser explicitly urged the United States and Israel to “expedite” such a collapse. “The issue here is whether the West and Israel can construct a strategy for limiting and expediting the chaotic collapse that will ensue in order to move on to the task of creating a better circumstance.”
(As far as I can tell from skimming Wurmser's paper, what he didn't like about the then current situation was the nationalism of the Baathist rulers. Like many tories, his brow became dewy in the presence of the our-class-dear hereditarily fancy; correspondingly his bizarre "Hashemite option" for expediting the chaotic collapse was to induce the royals of Jordan to woo clan leaders throughout the region, establishing a great big feudal-monarchic structure along the lines of mediaeval Britain: in other words, to restore the "natural" royalist system installed with great brutality by the Brits in the '20s. So much for the Wilsonian rhetoric. As we now know, the Bush Gang had worked overtime with great care and delicacy prior to the invasion to bring this option about, by establishing the necessary diplomatic ties among the Hashemite clan bosses.)
Wow! So the leading war "planners" at the Pentagon themselves had no illusions about the inevitability of "chaotic collapse". The left from top to bottom, and the upper echelons of the right, were in total agreement! All the "peeance and freeance" rhetoric from the right was not just moronic drivel, but pure unadulterated bullshit. The only suckers here were the lumpen-right.
Memo to the lumpen-right: don't get fooled again.
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