And This Was The Good Stuff

Parts of the NIE on Iraq are out (AmericaBlog's link is the most reliable I've seen), and it really doesn't help the Bush Administration at all.

• Although we cannot measure the extent of the spread with precision, a large body of all-source reporting indicates that activists identifying themselves as jihadists, although a small percentage of Muslims, are increasing in both number and geographic dispersion.

• If this trend continues, threats to US interests at home and abroad will become more diverse, leading to increasing attacks worldwide [...]

• We assess that the Iraq jihad is shaping a new generation of terrorist leaders and operatives; perceived jihadist success there would inspire more fighters to continue the struggle elsewhere.

• The Iraq conflict has become the “cause celebre” for jihadists, breeding a deep resentment of US involvement in the Muslim world and cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement. Should jihadists leaving Iraq perceive themselves, and be perceived, to have failed, we judge fewer fighters will be inspired to carry on the fight.

Remember, this is the part Bush ALLOWED the DNI to release. This is a major blow to the whole "resurgence" of the Administration as focused on the threat of terror. It very simply concludes that their terror strategy is not working.

Ex-CIA agent Larry Johnson interprets the findings as basically in line with what the intelligence community has known for some time, based on the public record. Look at this graph:



Significant incidents and total incidents of terrorism didn't increase until after the invasion of Iraq in 2003. At that point they skyrocketed. You can't read this data any other way.

Johnson continues:

Ray Close, who served as the top CIA official in Saudi Arabia, has offered the following on the importance of the current NIE:

"No reasonable person can possibly deny that our intervention in Iraq has been an enormous stimulus to terrorist activity worldwide. Efforts by John McCain and others to discount the significance of that factor by pointing out that the attacks on 9/11 occurred before our overthrow of Saddam Hussein is as trivial and irrelevant as they are disingenuous [...]

A National Intelligence Estimate is just exactly what the title says it is. An NIE isn't issued every day. It sometimes takes weeks to write and coordinate. Even the decision to prepare an NIE in the first place is a painstaking one. It is a BIG DEAL, in other words. An NIE is not a single report from a single agency, but represents the considered judgment of the entire intelligence community (16 different agencies, in theory) on a subject deemed to be of vital significance to makers of national security and foreign policy.

If key members of Congress (like Majority Leader Bill Frist, who claimed ignorance of this report), and neither the House nor the Senate intelligence committees, have seen the document since it was produced in April, then we have to ask ourselves whether the White House and Congress take any serious interest in the most important products of America's enormous (and extremely expensive) intelligence empire. Are we to conclude that the "brains" of the United States Government (presumably those who formulate and carry out national policy) are simply not interested in making use of the best information and advice available to them? That seems to confirm the growing impression that policy is influenced today more by considerations of ideology and political expediency than by painstaking and objective study of the world situation."

This is shaping up to be a terrible week for the White House, and a depressing week for the country, as we see the true consequences of our actions. Our only hope to dig ourselves out of this mess is by changing course on this failed terror strategy. There's only one party signaling they will change that course.