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| Home Front: Politix |
| WSJ: declassify the NIE |
| 2006-09-26 |
| Today's house editorial; boldface emphasis added. As media scoops go, those based on "classified" information seem to have a special cachet. But judging from the latest, selective intelligence leak about terrorism, we wonder if anyone would bother to read this stuff if it didn't have the word "secret" slapped on it. That's our reaction to Sunday's New York Times report claiming that a 2006 national intelligence estimate, or NIE, concludes that "the Iraq war has made the overall terrorism problem worse," according to one of the unidentified "intelligence officials" cited in the article. This is supposedly because the war has provoked radical Islamists to hate America even more than they already did before they hijacked airplanes and flew them into buildings. "If only we hadn't attacked them, we might have been able to reason with them." If this is the kind of insight we pay our spooks to generate, we're in more trouble than we thought. It's impossible to know how true this report is, of course, since the NIE itself hasn't been leaked. The reports are based on what sources claim the NIE says, but we don't know who those sources are and what motivations they might have. Since their spin coincides rather conveniently with the argument made by Democratic critics of the war, "Golly, Dr. Dean, it's like they was reading our minds or sumpin'. What're the odds o' dat?" and since this leak has also conveniently sprung in high campaign season, wise readers will be skeptical. . . . As for the substance of the 2006 NIE's alleged claims, does anyone doubt that many jihadis are rallying against the American presence in Iraq? The newspapers tell us that much every day. Whether the war in Iraq has produced more terrorist hatred than would otherwise exist, however, is a matter of opinion and strategic judgment. We recall, for example, that one of Osama bin Laden's justifications for declaring war against the U.S. was American enforcement of sanctions and a no-fly zone against Iraq before the 2003 invasion. Bin Laden didn't need the war to hate us. More broadly, the liberation of Iraq and Afghanistan has deprived the jihadis of two safe havens and sources of funds. So while there are still many al Qaeda-type terror cells out there, there's no reason to believe they are any more dangerous now than before April 2003. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, one of the terrorists who was harbored in Iraq before the war, certainly isn't any more dangerous; he's dead. The real issue at stake here is a political and policy fight over the future of Iraq. The Democrats claim that Iraq is a "distraction" from the war on terror and so a rapid U.S. withdrawal would leave the U.S. with more resources to fight elsewhere. Mr. Bush says Iraq is now the central front in the war on terror, and that withdrawing would create a vacuum that the Islamists would fill and give them a potential new state-supported base of operations. That's the choice voters really ought to be thinking about as they go to the polls in November, and if the NIE has something useful to say about that debate, Mr. Bush should disarm the selective leakers in his bureaucracy by making it public. |
| Posted by:Mike |
| #1 I am kind of against declassifing the NIE and other documents. It would send a really bad precident and I don't think that our nations secrets should be used for political gain/attack. I am in favor of finding and prosecuting the leaker. I did notice that none of the memebrs of the Intelligence oversight commitee (D or R) are quoting or citing the NIE. That should tell you that maybe the "leaked" information doesn't have the whole picture. Sure it is nice when Kennedy (Communist-Mass) has to eat his words but that won't stop him form opening his yap in the future so why bother. |
| Posted by: Cyber Sarge 2006-09-26 10:55 |