WASHINGTON, Oct 12: The Bush administration paid scant attention to prewar US intelligence on Iraq predicting the ethnic and tribal turmoil that now threatens the future of the country, a newly released 2004 CIA report said.

The report said US policymakers instead concentrated more on the agency’s assessments of Iraq’s weapons programme, which helped them make the case for the March 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq but which turned out to be flawed and misleading.

“Intelligence assessments on post-Saddam issues were particularly insightful,” said the report.

But it added: “In an ironic twist, the policy community was receptive to technical intelligence (the weapons programme) where the analysis was wrong, but apparently paid little attention to intelligence on cultural and political issues (post-Saddam Iraq), where the analysis was right.”

Administration officials justified the 2003 invasion in part on assertions that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and was a threat to the region and the United States. No such weapons have been found and investigations have blamed the CIA for huge lapses in its prewar intelligence.

The report, published in the current issue of the quarterly CIA magazine, Studies in Intelligence, was commissioned by former CIA Director George Tenet. He resigned last year after fierce criticism over the faulty Iraqi weapons assessments.

The report said the agency was largely correct in its estimate of cultural and political postwar issues and ‘accurately forecast the reactions of the ethnic and tribal factions in Iraq’.

The Bush administration suggested early in the Iraq war that American forces would be greeted as liberators by a grateful Iraqi people. President George W. Bush initially took a cavalier approach to the resistance, suggesting it would be no threat to US forces there and declaring: “Bring ‘em on!”

Presented in July 2004, the report said prewar Iraq intelligence also concluded accurately that Saddam had no operational or collaborative ties with Al Qaeda and calculated the war’s impact on oil markets.—Reuters