By all indications, the White House released the declassified National Intelligence Estimate report yesterday for political gain. The Bush gang swears the timing was coincidental, but there’s no reason to give the president the benefit of the doubt — the White House could have released the report at any time. Team Bush decided to wait until the afternoon of a major Senate debate on Iraq.
The ironic part of this, of course, is that the NIE should be humiliating for the White House. Bush and his congressional allies seized on the report as some kind of evidence that the war in Iraq must continue. More generally, the same GOP machine seems to believe that almost any reference at all to al Qaeda necessarily bolsters supporters of the status quo in Iraq.
But let’s not lose sight of the forest for the trees — this report is awful news for the United States.
Nearly six years after the Sept. 11 attacks, the hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of lives expended in the name of the war on terror pose a single, insistent question: Are we safer?
On Tuesday, in a dark and strikingly candid two pages, the nation’s intelligence agencies offered an implicit answer, and it was not encouraging. In many respects, the National Intelligence Estimate suggests, the threat of terrorist violence against the United States is growing worse, fueled by the Iraq war and spreading Islamic extremism.
The conclusions were not new, echoing the private comments of government officials and independent experts for many months. But the stark declassified summary contrasted sharply with the more positive emphasis of President Bush and his top aides for years: that two-thirds of Al Qaeda’s leadership had been killed or captured; that the Iraq invasion would reduce the terrorist menace; and that the United States had its enemies “on the run,” as Mr. Bush has frequently put it.
After years of war in Afghanistan and Iraq and targeted killings in Yemen, Pakistan and elsewhere, the major threat to the United States has the same name and the same basic look as in 2001: Al Qaeda, led by Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahri, plotting attacks from mountain hide-outs near the Afghan-Pakistani border.
Thinks about that. It’s been nearly six years since the 9/11 attacks, after which Bush launched a “global war on terror.” Taking stock, and considering how far we’ve come, we see that we’ve made hardly any progress at all, and in some important ways, we’ve gone backwards.
Daniel L. Byman, a former intelligence officer and the director of the Center for Peace and Security Studies at Georgetown, said the NIE itself might just as well have been headlined: “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” — the warning Bush ignored in August 2001.
Indeed, as an NYT editorial noted, an “honest reading” of the report leads to “a powerful rebuke” of Bush’s “approach to the war on terror.” The Times added, “It vindicates those who say that the Iraq war is a distraction from the real fight against terrorism — a fight that is not going at all well.”
A separate piece on the administration’s reaction to the report was equally blunt: “President Bush’s top counterterrorism advisers acknowledged Tuesday that the strategy for fighting Osama bin Laden’s leadership of Al Qaeda in Pakistan had failed.” The WaPo’s Michael Abramowitz added that the NIE undermined the White House’s rationale for staying in Iraq, and explained that Bush’s defense of his counter-terrorism policies has begun to “unravel.”
Slate’s Fred Kaplan explained that the NIE “amounts to a devastating critique” of the administration’s entire approach to the Middle East.
Its main point is that the threat — after having greatly receded over the past five years — is back in full force. Al-Qaida has “protected or regenerated key elements” of its ability to attack the United States. It has a “safe haven” in Pakistan. Its “top leadership” and “operational lieutenants” are intact. It is cooperating more with “regional terrorist groups.”
As a result, the report concludes, “the U.S. Homeland will face a persistent and evolving terrorist threat over the next three years” and is, even now, “in a heightened threat environment.”
This is bad enough news for President Bush, who has tried to bank support for his policies on the claim that the terrorist threat has diminished.
Worse news still is the report’s further observation — never stated explicitly but clear nonetheless — that the threat has re-emerged as a result of the war in Iraq.
The report — the unclassified version of a consensus product by the 16 agencies of the U.S. intelligence community — also notes that the threat will grow still larger if we appear to threaten Iran.
Faced with a pressing global threat in the wake of a devastating attack, the president has managed to fail in every possible way. That the White House considers this news politically advantageous is enough to make me worry about their collective sanity.