US: Four days before the initial bombing of Baghdad in March 2003, NBC's Tim Russert asked the Vice President, Mr Dick Cheney: "Do you think the American people are prepared for a long, costly and bloody battle with significant American casualties?"
"Well, I don't think it's likely to unfold that way, Tim," Mr Cheney replied, "because I really do believe that we will be greeted as liberators." Since then critics of the war have assailed Mr Cheney for a catastrophic error of judgment but now it seems that it was something more.
In painting a rosy picture of post-occupation Iraq, Mr Cheney and President Bush were going counter to a much more bleak assessment by US intelligence services of the potential costly consequences of an American-led invasion.
It had been delivered to them by the National Intelligence Council two months before the war and has just now been leaked, apparently because of a deepening hostility between the CIA on the one hand and the White House and Pentagon on the other.
The warning came in classified reports prepared for Mr Bush in January 2003 by the council, an independent group comprising several agencies which advises the CIA director, according to US officials quoted in the New York Times. They predicted that an American-led invasion of Iraq would increase support for political Islam and would result in a deeply divided Iraqi society prone to violent internal conflict.
One of the reports also warned of a possible insurgency against a new Iraqi government or American-led forces and that former Saddam government officials could conduct guerrilla warfare either alone or with terrorist groups.
The assessments also said a war would increase sympathy across the Islamic world for some terrorist objectives, at least in the short run, the officials said.
The disclosure gives ammunition to Democratic challenger Mr John Kerry, who is facing Mr Bush in Miami, Florida, tomorrow in a debate on foreign policy and national security.
The Massachusetts senator has sharply stepped up allegations that the President and Mr Cheney misled the American people about the reasons for going to war and what the aftermath would involve.
Last week Mr Bush dismissed as "just guessing" the latest National Intelligence Council report outlining scenarios for Iraq next year ranging from continued instability to civil war. It is unprecedented for a president to treat a CIA report so disdainfully.
Mr Bush's spokesman also derided the bleak assessment, provided to the White House in August, as the prognosis of "hand-wringers".
The chief "hand-wringer" was, it turns out, Mr Paul Pillar, the CIA's current national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia, according to conservative columnist Robert Novak writing in Monday's Washington Post.
Mr Pillar told a private dinner on the West Coast last week "of secret, unheeded warnings years ago about going to war in Iraq", Novak claimed. The CIA confirmed that Mr Pillar spoke and that he was not meant to be identified as the source of the comments. The CIA official reportedly told the guests that he and his colleagues concluded early in the Bush administration that military intervention in Iraq would intensify anti-American hostility throughout Islam.
Mr George Tenet retired as CIA director in mid-summer, depriving Mr Bush of a close colleague in charge of intelligence. The new director, Mr Porter Goss, was approved by the Senate a week ago.
In interviews at the weekend, the US Secretary of State, Mr Colin Powell, acknowledged an increase in anti-Americanism in the Muslim world and that the insurgency in Iraq was getting worse in the run-up to the election.
Meanwhile Mr Bush, preparing at Crawford, Texas, for tomorrow's debate, accused Mr Kerry of "putting our protection at risk", in a new campaign ad released yesterday. "Strength builds peace. Weakness invites those who do us harm," the ad states, going on to accuse Mr Kerry of "refusing to support our troops in combat".
Responding, a Kerry spokesman accused the Bush campaign of "using the politics of fear" to mask the president's mistakes in Iraq.
Mr Bush also insisted in a Fox TV interview that Iran would not develop a nuclear weapon while he is in office. Asked by host Bill O'Reilly whether he would allow Iran to build a bomb, he said: "No, we've made it clear, our position is that they won't have a nuclear weapon."
The weekly newspaper in President Bush's adopted home town of Crawford yesterday endorsed Mr Kerry for president. The Lone Star Iconoclast, which backed Mr Bush in 2000, criticised the president for his handling of the war in Iraq and for turning budget surpluses into record deficits.