Confirming The Obvious: Iraq War Made World Less Safe (Pt. II)

Following up on a post Sunday about reports that a classified National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) from April found that "the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks", there were calls from Democrats to declassify the document and release it for public consumption. Yesterday, President Bush agreed to declassify parts of it. The PDF of the declassified document is available- here.

Despite the President's rhetoric, the report does say what the initial leaks implied-

The war in Iraq has become a "cause celebre" for Islamic extremists, breeding deep resentment of the U.S. that probably will get worse before it gets better, federal intelligence analysts conclude in a report at odds with President Bush's portrayal of a world growing safer.

In the bleak report, declassified and released Tuesday on Bush's orders, the nation's most veteran analysts conclude that despite serious damage to the leadership of al-Qaida, the threat from Islamic extremists has spread both in numbers and in geographic reach.

Bush and his top advisers have said the formerly classified assessment of global terrorism supported their arguments that the world is safer because of the war. But more than three pages of stark judgments warning about the spread of terrorism contrasted with the administration's glass-half-full declarations...

If these are the parts Bush agreed to release, imagine what's in the parts he didn't release.

Read the AP report linked above for a good breakdown on its non-Iraq findings. The sad part is that those non-Iraq findings do paint a decent picture, showing that we have made good progress in breaking down Al Qaeda (I recommend reading Ron Suskind's "The One Percent Doctrine" if you want specifics). But then President Bush had to go invade Iraq and he overshadowed any of that progress by creating countless new problems for us to deal with. Sad.

UPDATE: Rep. Jane Harman (D- CA) has revealed the existence of another classified NIE, this one specifically dealing with Iraq. The White House has said that it won't be made public until January... 2 months after the elections.

The official spin on this by the Bush defenders is a strawman-- they state that those discussing the findings imply that the Iraq war created terrorism and that they didn't hate us already. No one is arguing this. The report clearly states, however, that the war has increased terrorism and further radicalized Muslims against the U.S. and its allies. After 9/11, most of the Muslim world sympathized with us. In fact, the attacks even drove a wedge among those who had been sympathetic to bin Laden, feeling that he had gone too far and that an attack on civilians was not justified by jihad. This was a fantastic opportunity to unite the world against terrorism and bring the Middle East together, as best as could be done. This opportunity was squandered and the President's "with us or against us" pronouncements and Iraq obsession ended up losing that sympathy and convincing many in the Muslim world that maybe bin Laden was right after all. It was shortsighted and hubristic.

And, as I noted, this was the outcome that was forewarned and ignored.

Furthermore, the President said yesterday that "I think it's a mistake for people to believe that going on the offense against people that want to do harm to the American people makes us less safe". Well this also is a bit of a strawman. It's also gravely stupid. There is a smart way and a stupid way to 'go on the offense'- the stupid way will make you less safe. Secondly, this quote once again attempts to conflate the Iraq invasion with the war on terror. It was a poor lie three years ago and it's a poor lie today.

I close with some more headlines on Iraq, none of them any more hopeful than this...

-AP: U.S. Army extends Iraq duty for 4,000
-AP: Iraq forms panel on constitution changes
-The Independent (UK): A journey into the 'Taliban republic' where the militias rule unchallenged
-AP: Ex-military officers criticize Rumsfeld
-YouTube: Maj. Gen. John Batiste - Planning & Conduct of the Iraq War
-AP: Congress approves $70B more for Iraq, Afghanistan