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In March 2002, [[Seymour Hersh]] reported in ''The New Yorker'' that "A dispute over Chalabi's potential usefulness preoccupies the bureaucracy" within the U.S. government, "as the civilian leadership in the Pentagon continues to insist that only the INC can lead the opposition. At the same time, a former Administration official told me, 'Everybody but the Pentagon and the office of the Vice-President wants to ditch the INC.' The INC's critics note that Chalabi, despite years of effort and millions of dollars in American aid, is intensely unpopular today among many elements in Iraq. 'If Chalabi is the guy, there could be a civil war after Saddam's overthrow,' one former [[CIA]] operative told me. A former high-level Pentagon official added, 'There are some things that a President can't order up, and an internal opposition is one.'" [http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?020311fa_FACT]
Notwithstanding these concerns, Hersh reported that "INC supporters in and around the Administration, including [[Paul Dundes Wolfowitz]] and [[Richard Perle]], believe, like Chalabi, that any show of force would immediately trigger a revolt against Saddam within Iraq, and that it would quickly expand." In December 2002, Robert Dreyfuss reported that the administration of [[George Walker Bush]] actually preferred INC-supplied analyses of Iraq over analyses provided by long-standing analysts within the CIA. "Even as it prepares for war against Iraq, the Pentagon is already engaged on a second front: its war against the Central Intelligence Agency.," he wrote.
"The Pentagon is bringing relentless pressure to bear on the agency to produce intelligence reports more supportive of war with Iraq. ... Morale inside the U.S. national-security apparatus is said to be low, with career staffers feeling intimidated and pressured to justify the push for war." Much of the pro-war faction's information came from the INC, even though "most Iraq hands with long experience in dealing with that country's tumultuous politics consider the INC's intelligence-gathering abilities to be nearly nil. ... The Pentagon's critics are appalled that intelligence provided by the INC might shape U.S. decisions about going to war against Baghdad. At the CIA and at the State Department, Ahmed Chalabi, the INC's leader, is viewed as the ineffectual head of a self-inflated and corrupt organization skilled at lobbying and public relations, but not much else." [http://www.prospect.org/print-friendly/print/V13/22/dreyfuss-r.html]
"The [INC's] intelligence isn't reliable at all," said [[Vincent Cannistraro]], a former senior CIA official and [[counterterrorism]] expert. "Much of it is [[propaganda]]. Much of it is telling the [[Defense Department]] what they want to hear. And much of it is used to support Chalabi's own presidential ambitions. They make no distinction between intelligence and propaganda, using alleged informants and defectors who say what Chalabi wants them to say, [creating] [[cooked information]] that goes right into presidential and vice-presidential speeches." [http://www.prospect.org/print-friendly/print/V13/22/dreyfuss-r.html]
