Americans have a choice — they can believe the president, who said just yesterday that the war in Iraq is not contributing to the spread of terrorism, or they can believe the combined judgment of the 16 U.S. intelligence agencies, which collectively believe the polar opposite.
In announcing yesterday that he would release the key judgments of a controversial National Intelligence Estimate, President Bush said he agreed with the document’s conclusion “that because of our successes against the leadership of al-Qaeda, the enemy is becoming more diffuse and independent.”
But the estimate itself posits no such cause and effect. Instead, while it notes that counterterrorism efforts have seriously damaged and disrupted al-Qaeda’s leadership, it describes the spreading “global jihadist movement” as fueled largely by forces that al-Qaeda exploits but is not actively directing. They include Iraq, corrupt and unjust governments in Muslim-majority countries, and “pervasive anti-U.S. sentiment among most Muslims.”
Bush said the news reports from Sunday about the NIE’s conclusions were misleading, but they were right on the money. In the one-tenth of the report which was declassified yesterday — if the other 90% was helpful to Bush, it stands to reason it would have been released too — there’s little doubt that the White House has been very wrong for a very long time.
The war is “shaping a new generation of terrorist leaders and operatives,” the document explains, creating a “cause celebre” for jihadists, which in turn “cultivat[es] supporters for the global jihadist movement.” The movement will likely grow faster, the WaPo noted, than “the West’s ability to counter it over the next five years.”
“Nowhere in the assessment,” the NYT notes, “is any evidence to support Mr. Bush’s confident-sounding assertion this month in Atlanta that ‘America is winning the war on terror.'” On the contrary, the report says, the terrorists “are increasing in both number and geographic dispersion.”
Given the intelligence, the president and his supporters have been selling a bill of goods. We have created a breeding ground for terrorism. The number of terrorists has gone up since we started fighting the war. Only the Bush White House could characterize this as “success.”
It’s worth noting, of course, that this isn’t the NIE; it’s a small part of a much larger document. We don’t know what the rest of the document says, and we have no sense of the intelligence community’s dissents and/or caveats. As Kevin Drum put it, “Without seeing the context, analysis, and dissenting opinions that shaped them, there’s nothing to assess. You either accept the intelligence community’s expertise or you don’t.”
With this in mind, it’s still important for the administration to release a redacted version of the NIE — and publish the Iraq-specific NIE — before the election. After all, Bush said he wants everyone to be able to “draw their own conclusions” about the intelligence, and the only way for that to happen is to get a broader sense of what the intelligence says.