Could have saved a few bucks

An Associated Press story is saying that ex CIA director Tenet's book stated that the CIA warned the President of 'anarchy' in Iraq. Now, that is the first thing out of his book that I actually believe.

Any politician would have realized that was the chance taken when rolling the dice on Iraq. It does not take a few hundred billion dollars in intelligence gathering equipment to know that either, all they would have had to do was ask any vet, we would have told them free of charge.

A few of my buddies and I, each a veteran, had gathered for coffee one night while the build up for the invasion was taking place. The fact of the build up turning into a full scale assault at any moment was the topic of conversation.

The first thing we all agreed upon was the Iraqi military would blend into the population and turn to guerrilla warfare against our troops. The rest of our little arm-chair quarterback coffee session was just as successful in painting exactly what would become of an invasion of Iraq. The last comment being that our military would be tied up in this war for many years to come.

This is not intelligence gathering, heck, between us we may have been able to come up with a few thousand bucks, not the hundreds of billions the CIA spends on electronic and on the ground intelligence.

Here is a quote from the story, Just to show you how exact five veterans could be, "While the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies have been widely criticized for being wrong about much of the pre-war intelligence on Iraq, the analysis Tenet describes concerning postwar scenarios seems prescient. Iraq is buffeted by brutal sectarian violence and there are suggestions that the country be partitioned into ethnic zones."

One other topic among our coffee fueled session on an invasion was all the President and his cabinet would have to do was to ask any veteran of the Viet Nam, non-declared war and we could tell them exactly what they were going to face. We all have been there, done that, even wearing the t-shirt.

My point is that this was common knowledge and not just among us old warhorses, but it was even being discussed by every reporter in every paper and magazine.

Now the former CIA Director George Tenet is whining the old, "Hey guys, it's not my fault; I tried to tell them, they would not listen!"

Maybe the next time someone in the White House wants to know the future they will ask a few of us who could actually tell them the truth, in all of its bloody outcome, maybe they could save a few billion and spend it on the returning troopers so they could have a little better life.