This isn't the first time. In the run-up to the Iraq war, they didn't do an NIE, either.  USA Today reported this in a an article published on Spetember 11, 2002, "Iraq course set from tight White House circle" that is chock full of damning information.  It begins this:

Iraq course set from tight White House circle

By John Diamond, Judy Keen, Dave Moniz, Susan Page and Barbara Slavin, USA TODAY

WASHINGTON — President Bush's determination to oust Iraq's Saddam Hussein by military force if necessary was set last fall without a formal decision-making meeting or the intelligence assessment that customarily precedes such a momentous decision.

Before the United Nations General Assembly on Thursday, Bush will make his case for "regime change" in detail and in public for the first time. But he decided that Saddam must go more than 10 months ago; the debate within the administration since then has been about the means to accomplish that end.

How did Bush make the decision, perhaps the most consequential of his presidency?

USA TODAY interviewed officials at the White House, State Department, Pentagon, intelligence agencies, Congress and elsewhere to explore what factors were weighed and whose voices were heard. The process underscores Bush's confidence in his own judgment and his hard-line policy instincts. It shows his reliance on a tight circle of aides, his penchant for secrecy and his preference for unilateral action. And it illustrates how his approach has complicated his efforts now to win support from allies and members of Congress who felt they weren't adequately consulted before.

Among the key findings:

The decision to target Saddam "kind of evolved, but it's not clear and neat," a senior administration official says, calling it "policymaking by osmosis."

"There wasn't a flash moment. There's no decision meeting," national security adviser Condoleezza Rice says. "But Iraq had been on the radar screen — that it was a danger and that it was something you were going to have to deal with eventually ... before Sept. 11, because we knew that this was a problem."

Members of Congress weren't consulted. Nor were key allies. The concerns of senior military officers and intelligence analysts, some of whom remain skeptical, weren't fully aired until afterward.

The White House still has not requested that the CIA and other intelligence agencies produce a National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, a formal document that would compile all the intelligence data into a single analysis. An intelligence official says that's because the White House doesn't want to detail the uncertainties that persist about Iraq's arsenal and Saddam's intentions. A senior administration official says such an assessment simply wasn't seen as helpful.

Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, calls that "stunning."

"If we are about to make a decision that could risk American lives, we need full and accurate information on which to base that decision," he says in a letter sent Tuesday to leaders of the committee and CIA Director George Tenet.

Some of the factors that figured in the decision last October — including fears that the al-Qaeda network might be close to obtaining nuclear weapons and that international terrorists might be behind the anthrax attacks — now seem to have been overblown. But the decision wasn't revisited.

It was only when Democratic senators started to raise a stink--note the letter to Tenet mentioned above--that they threw together an NIE to present to the Senate Intelligence Committee. And we all know how politicized that process was.

The GOP needs a new mascot: The Ostrich instead of The Elephant.  An elephant never forgets, it's said.  But an ostrich never knows in the first place.

They were all going to throw flowers at us, remember?

It would just be filled with rosy scenarios and bald-faced lies.

Meanwhile Russia is busy cutting the US out of oil deals.

Treat your allies like dirt and you get mud.

that some Iraqi leaders who are working to stop this have intentionally kept outsiders from meddling in their efforts. (link )  If they succeed I'm sure Bush will try and take credit though.