Digging around in my archives recently, I found a post that contains one of the only predictions I’ve ever gotten right. The $87 billion was a trap and Kerry fell into it.

Then again, Bush wandering into a guerrilla war when he expected a cakewalk was a trap too. And like the $87 billion, that one was also predicted early :

U.S. intelligence agencies warned in two prewar reports to President Bush and Congress that an invasion of Iraq could increase support for terrorist organizations and lead to a violent postwar occupation, a U.S. official with access to the classified documents said Monday.

The reports were prepared by the National Intelligence Council (NIC), senior intelligence analysts who pool assessments from across the nation’s 15 intelligence organizations. The council reports to the CIA director. The official who described the contents of the January 2003 documents insisted on anonymity because they remain classified.

Congress, which received the reports at the same time they were presented to the White House in early 2003, had authorized Bush in October 2002 to use military force against Saddam Hussein’s regime.
. . .
One focused on near-term risks within Iraq posed by the aftermath of an invasion. The other assessed mid- to long-term potential problems across the Middle East that could be sparked by an invasion and occupation.

The NIC advised that a U.S.-led invasion to topple Saddam could unleash violence among Iraq’s internal political and ethnic factions that would require a substantial force to suppress.

The primary warning in this report was about unrest among Iraqi factions, not so much violence directed at the occupying force. In fact, the intelligence report said occupying forces would be needed to suppress civil strife.

But this report also warned of an insurgency aimed at the new Iraqi government or U.S. and allied forces, possibly involving surviving elements of Saddam’s regime.

In the broader report on regional implications, the council warned that a U.S.-led occupation could increase sympathy across the Middle East toward terrorist groups pursuing a militant Islamic agenda.

The warning makes this bit from an article about Bush’s stupidity even more troubling :

The most obvious expression of Bush’s choice of ignorance is that, at the age of 57, he knows nothing about policy or history…Well into his plans for invading Iraq, Bush still couldn’t get down the distinction between Sunni and Shiite Muslims, the key religious divide in a country he was about to occupy.
. . .
A second, more damning aspect of Bush’s mind-set is that he doesn’t want to know anything in detail, however important. Since college, he has spilled with contempt for knowledge, equating learning with snobbery and making a joke of his own anti-intellectualism.

And now we’re in an untenable quagmire because the leader of the free world wouldn’t pay attention to the people who knew the most about warfare and the region that he was about to invade.