It is the nature of opposing parties to oppose, and the number of ways to oppose the handling of the war in Iraq is vast. But Democrats, their many presidential candidates especially, should show patience on the most recent round of news stories that say the White House ignored multiple reports on the dangers of the post war. The dangers are certainly there, in ways apparently unanticipated by the administration, but the critics’ rush to connect the dots can lead them to simplistic errors of their own.

As reported this week in The Boston Globe, The Washington Post and elsewhere, early this year the Defense Intelligence Agency and the CIA warned the National Security Council that a quick victory in Iraq would be followed by guerilla-type fighting that could make reconstruction difficult. This view was not only secret intelligence – a large number of Middle East experts suggested it was a possibility and those opposed to the war used it extensively. Not the administration. It wanted the war and it described the post-war rosily. Vice President Dick Cheney said in mid-March, “My belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators.”

He was correct, but of course the troops were not only greeted as liberators, but also as protectors, economic revivalists, righters of past wrongs and, unfortunately, targets for bullets. This was more than the administration described to the public, which the Democratic presidential candidates this week at their debates obligingly pointed out. But no worthy administration relies on just a few reports; it must choose among dozens of often-conflicting accounts of what is likely to happen. It is a complicated business, colored by the desires of those who craft and those who receive the intelligence. The question is not whether the administration’s conclusion among the many possible scenarios was correct; the questions are did it act responsibly in its choice and did its conclusions change as new information became available?

The administration seems to have grasped that its original hopeful prognosis must be balanced with the complications described by the experts last winter. There will be plenty of opportunities to review what the administration knew and when it knew it concerning the immediate aftermath of the war, but for now it is more important that critics of the administration speak loudly for how the United States ought to proceed rather than where it has been.