Among other conclusions, the analysts found:
Establishing a stable democracy in Iraq would be a long, steep and probably turbulent challenge. They said that contributions could be made by 4 million Iraqi exiles and Iraq's impoverished, underemployed middle class. But they noted that opposition parties would need sustained economic, political and military support.
Al-Qaida would see the invasion as a chance to accelerate its attacks, and the lines between al-Qaida and other terrorist groups "could become blurred." In a weak spot in the analysis, one paper said that the risk of terror attacks would spike after the invasion and slow over the next three to five years. However, the State Department recently found that attacks last year alone rose sharply.
Groups in Iraq's deeply divided society would become violent, unless stopped by the occupying force. "Score settling would occur throughout Iraq between those associated with Saddam's regime and those who have suffered most under it," one report stated.
Iraq's neighbors would jockey for influence and Iranian leaders would try to shape the post-Saddam era to demonstrate Tehran's importance in the region. The less Tehran felt threatened by U.S. actions, the analysts said, "the better the chance that they could cooperate in the postwar period."
Postwar Iraq would face significant economic challenges, having few resources beyond oil. Analysts predicted that Iraq's large petroleum resources would make economic reconstruction easier, but they didn't anticipate that continued fighting and sabotage would drag down oil production.
Military action to eliminate Iraq's weapons of mass destruction would not cause other governments in the region to give up such programs.
As numerous investigations have found, the intelligence agencies of the United States and its allies were wrong about Iraq's supposed weapons programs.
The report is the latest chapter in the Intelligence Committee's ongoing investigation into the prewar Iraq intelligence. Because committee members couldn't agree on clear conclusions about the postwar predictions, they saved their analyses for appendices attached to the report.
"The most chilling and prescient warning from the intelligence community prior to the war was that the American invasion would bring about instability in Iraq that would be exploited by Iran and al-Qaida," They said the reports weren't based on intelligence information, but instead were speculation from experts in and out of government.
"They were no more authoritative than the many other educated opinions that were available in the same time frame," the Republicans wrote.
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