I see in today's paper that the Bush administration was warned ahead of time about precisely those events that came to pass in Iraq after the ouster of Saddam Hussein: the struggle for power between Sunnis and Shiites, the appearance of a home-grown tentacle of AlQaida in Iraq, and the near certainty of an extension of Iranian influence into the country. (As to the latter, I've often wondered if the Iranians themselves didn't engineer — through Chalabi and his staff, whom Bush almost seemed to worship, in Washington — the American overthrow of Saddam.)
According to Republicans, however, documents showing these warnings, and their release, "exaggerate[s] the significance" of this early intelligence, because, according to my local newspaper, "they were based more on expert analysis than on hard intelligence."
Surprise! The CIA had no hard intelligence about the future. Does anybody?
That is why the CIA, the NSA, and other such organizations hire experts to analyze. There is no hard intelligence about the future.