An intelligence assessment that the war in Iraq increased Islamic radicalism, worsening the terror threat, set off a sharp debate today among American political officials over credit and blame for the war and the broader fight against terrorism....
The new intelligence report, the National Intelligence Estimate, implicitly questioned assertions from Bush administration officials that the United States is now safer from terrorism than it was before Sept. 11, 2001, if not yet entirely safe, and that it would be less so under Democratic leadership.
Comments? You know you have to face up to this.
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55 comments:
Yes and no.
We are and we aren't.
Peace, Maxine
It seems as though America is safe from American-bred terrorists, as the police/fbi are pretty efficient in their jobs. Most American Muslims I have spoken with love the 'ole USA and would never want to return to their original soil, peace- and freedom-loving people, Gott sei Dank! Unfortunately, the UK has its share of problems foiling terror plots orchestrated by its own citizens.
I think after 9/11, we are all more vigilant, and also aware of our human limitations in terms of security, but I do think that we are now safer. At the very least, we know to avoid those situations that might raise that question, of whether or not we are safe. Olympics in London 2012 ~ think twice.
How can you even believe our own intelligience reports after the abject failure over Iraq's WMD? Wasn't Tenet quoted as saying it is a slam dunk?
Don't you have to be skeptical about this report and others that claim Iraq has been great for terrorist recruiting- how the f do they know - do they station reporters or spies outside the recruiting offices (lol) and do headcounts of visitors?
Lastly, the usual suspects (LAT, NYT, my Philly Inquirer, the Post) reported this latest "intelligence report" on their front pages. And of course Harry Reid and company are piling on too.
So far as I can tell, the article never actually links to the report. So what we're basically left with is not to "Face up" to what the report says, but to "face up" to whether we trust the New Tork Times to accurately characterize the report. And the answer is "not really." When the NYT starts trusrting its readers to make their own judgements by making the report available, thereby allowing us to immediately verify its claims, I might start trusting what it says.
I don't know that it's possible to say whether we're safer, though st's point about vigilance is a good one. Would we be safer trying to appease Islamic radicals?
Also, I don't know whether increasing Islamic radicalism increases the terror threat here or not - I suspect the group of those radicals that wants to attend protests and scream for the death of the Pope is a little larger than the group that wants to "martyr" itself.
Finally, one of my first reactions to a statement like
"the National Intelligence Estimate...implicitly questioned assertions from Bush administration officials that the United States is now safer from terrorism than it was before Sept. 11, 2001, if not yet entirely safe, and that it would be less so under Democratic leadership"
is, "I'll be the judge of that". Alas, there's no link in the article to the actual NIE. Does that document really assess national security based on hypothetical election results in the US? According to the BBC (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/5375064.stm ), the NYT staff hasn't even seen it, though I'm sure their sources have no axe to grind
If I were falsely detained, rendered up to Syrian torture and then barred from suing my torturers or the CIA folks and their superiors who ordered the torture and who are then declared immune from criminal prosecution, I would terminally abandon all hope in finding justice in the courts of a supposed "nation of laws" and go right to Plan B.
Not until the consequences of Amerika's war against freedom are carried to our gated-community Whites will Amerika begin to return to Freedom and the American Way.
Have to face up to this, eh, Ann?
Clearly the joke's on you. Judging from the commments here, there is nothing that will shake some people's faith in the righteousness and/or effectiveness of the Iraq War. Their brains have been completely Freedom fried.
National Intelligence Estimate? Probably just more Defeatocrat propaganda.
First, I do not entirely trust the NIE to reflect _current_ thinking about _future_ threats, given that they so often reflect only the PAST.
Second, the NIE is classified; only the part leaked is printed. DookofURL makes this point better than I would have. The leakers no doubt have their own motives for leaking it.
Third, are we even sure that this accurately reflects the content of the NIE? Tom Clancy talks about a "canary trap", a method to identify and prosecute leakers if they leak actual quotes from documents. So this is probably a re-writing and re-phrasing, but is it an accurate restatement? We don't know.
4th, the editorial biases of the NYT are well known.
I don't entirely believe it.
A bit over the top, but this response makes a fair point:
'First of all, the U.S. has not declared war on all forms of terrorism, and not all terrorism is created equal. The creation of thousands of rock-throwing yahoos raging impotently in the streets is of little concern to the United States. The Unites States is concerned specifically about "terrorism of global reach."'
Doyle,
I take it that you do not think of Fox News as a scrupulously non-partisan source of news. Now, if Fox News ran a story in which they characterized a classified document as completely vindicating the Bush administration's policy, and if Fox didn't link to that document, and - worse yet - if a news source universally regarded as being fairly sympathetic to Fox said that "fox has not seen the report, but spoke to people familiar with it" to prepare that report, do you feel that YOU would have something to answer for?
I believe that, despite the fact that it was reported in the NYT, the NIE does in fact support the crazy theory that the Iraq War has increased the risk of terrorist attack.
I happened to subscribe to that theory already, though, so maybe I'm biased or something.
We won't be safer until our troops out of the Middle East. That's what is antognizing them the most. Remove the antagonism and the terror subsides.
Of course - we do get a kick out of kicking their ass and annoying them. I know I do. But that will cause more terror. Is the tradeoff worth it? I guess that's for Americans to decide. I can go both ways - depending on my mood.
Sometimes, I'm like "let's get out of there and let them kill themselves." Othertimes I'm like "let's just bomb the hell out of them, because they are scum and they deserve it.".
I have not read the NIE and apparently neither has the NYT. They have read parts leaked to them by the CIA. Isn't it obvious on its face that these portions are going to be those that appeal most to both folks at the CIA who want to embarrass the administration and also the NYT?
a couple of points:
1. The NYT's apparently confuse correlation and causality. The fact that terrorist recruiting increased after 9/11 as did our invasion, doesn't necessarily mean that our invasion of Iraq caused the increase in recruiting.
2. The invasion of Iraq and the attempt to bring democracy to the ME is a large gamble. I would argue that the jury is still out. It may prove to be a mistake, but if it succeeds, it creates a dramatically improved environment.
3. In order to convince me that we made an error in going into Iraq, you have to propose what we should have done instead? Defend fortress America? Issue a warrant for OBL? that was done years before. And none of that crap about "same as Bush only competently."
The question is not whether we are safer now; it is whether we would be safer than we are now by having done something different (e.g., not invading Iraq).
If you want to find out if the administration was "right" to have invaded Iraq, in terms of safety, you must ask how safe we would be if they hadn't invaded Iraq. The fact, if it is one, that we are less safe today than before Iraq is really irrelevant, and a distraction from the relevant inquiry.
1. Intelligence agencies don't impress me anymore. They're wrong more often than right.
2. Doesn't anyone recognize that when you fight terrorism and try and advance democracy in a screwed up region that breeds terrorism, that Islamic radicalism will increase for the short term and then, if we're successful, be defeated in the long run? The long run is what's most important, particularly with nulcear proliferation. Bush's policies won't be "proven" right or wrong in time for the November elections - sorry.
3. One thing that's clear is al Qaeda and its affiliates really don't want democray to succeed in the Middle East.
4. The number one gripe Bin Laden had with the USA pre-9/11 was our troops in Saudi Arabia. Keeping Saddam "in a box" creates Islamic radicalism too.
5. IMHO, we owed it to the people of Iraq to topple Saddam.
Safer, with nukes in Pakistan and North Korea? No, no way.
The other part of the report -- as reported -- is wrong. Islam has been making war against all the rest of the world whenever it felt powerful enough to do so -- that is, all the time except the years between about 1700 and about 1990, as regards western Europe -- so recruiting warriors against us was never its problem.
Among many things going on to form Islamic opinion and behavior, one is a version of the war mania that we have seen in our own time in, eg, Austria in the years before 1914 or Japan in the 1930s. In those cases, the aggressive state was, by any measure but a madman's, too weak to succeed in its task.
Proving it to them was very expensive. Until Islam gets another smackdown, as it got at Omdurman in 1898, we're less safe because Muslims are more deluded about Islam's military capability.
Israel's failure to go ahead to smackdown this year was very bad for Muslims, as it reinforced their delusion
Doyle, what is your basis for believing that - because that's the conclusion that fits best with your own views, of because the NYT (which is thoroughly dishonest in its implication that it has SEEN the report) says that the NIE says something, a claim which just happens to support the NYT's editorial stance? When and if you've read the NIE, you have some basis for commenting on what it says. Would you comment on a Supreme Court case without reading it? Why? It's not that you're biased - it's that you're full of it. I can't believe that you, of all people, are dumb enough to buy into this for no better reason than because the NYT hates Bush and you hate Bush too. You've distinguished yourself repeatedly as one of the smarter liberal voices here, but this iosn't helping your case.
I'm shocked, shocked that the CIA and NYT came to this conclusion, in this way.
In other news, sources within the State Department have revealed that Sec. Rice has used governmnet funds.
As Shanna said we are safer because we are aware of the threat. At least some of us are.
Lawrence Wright, author of The Looming Tower, was asked by Hugh Hewitt what he'd advise Bush. One of the things he tell Bush is that he should still be advacing democracy, even if it gets ugly. Which I agree with. The status quo and so;called "stability" in the Middle East could not be abided anymore, no matter how much the CIA wishes otherwise.
And secondly, I think that I believe in the democratization process. I don’t abandon that. But it’s going to be ugly, and it’s not going to be always very rewarding. I think Hamas in the future, we’ll see that again and again. But the thing about democracy that I genuinely believe is that it is an inherently moderating force. I think you can see that even right now with Hamas having to come to grips with being in power. They have to answer to the needs of the people. Turkey is a good example of a Islamist movement that has come into power and has had to adapt. So I say let them come to power through democratic processes, and it may not be pretty. But we can’t control everything. But if we do have people who are democratically elected, then we’ve got a better chance to have real partners.
http://hughhewitt.townhall.com/Transcript_Page.aspx?ContentGuid=ba70d3a3-0528-4007-b7db-724e431b3e65
Safer, with nukes in Pakistan and North Korea? No, no way.
Before Bush started waging war after 9/11, al Qaeda was on the brink of taking over Pakistan and Saddam was sending money to North Korea for missile systems.
Also, during Bush's first term, his administration helped back Pakistan and India down from nuclear war.
This is brilliant! I had no idea the U.S. Intelligence Community had a "what-if" machine that can precisely measure how many Islamic fundamentalist terrorists there would be today if Saddam Hussein were still in power! I love American ingenuity!
Do I get to ask it a question, too?
Okay. Ahem. If Grady Little had taken Pedro Martinez out of the playoff game against the Yankees, would the Red Sox have won?
We weren't safe before - we were blind - purposefully so in my opinion - Clinton's denials notwithstanding. And as a result they were killing us with no consequence.
We might not be safer now - however that is measured - but at least we are hitting back, and that is a step in the right direction.
Question is, does anyone seriously think we will be safer if we stick our heads in the sand again? That is what the left wants us to do, make no mistake.
I, for one, would rather go down fighting.
The classified National Intelligence Estimate attributes a more direct role to the Iraq war in fueling radicalism than that presented either in recent White House documents or in a report released Wednesday by the House Intelligence Committee, according to several officials in Washington involved in preparing the assessment or who have read the final document.
Would the NYT really run with this if there were a significant probability that when the report is published, these will look like unfair characterizations?
That seems to be the only reason to withold judgment on the specific question of what the NIE has to say about the effect of the Iraq War on the terrorist threat.
Someone pointed out that correlation doesn't prove causation. This is quite true, but it sounds like the NIE asserts that there is causation. That's what "fueling" implies.
We're in the middle of a war. Wars rarely make you safer while they are ongoing, it's after the war that makes the difference.
Would the NYT really run with this if there were a significant probability that when the report is published, these will look like unfair characterizations?
You're joking right?
Of course they would. And then run the corrections 2 months later buried in the back pages. Like they usually do when slamming a conservative.
Wars rarely make you safer while they are ongoing, it's after the war that makes the difference.
Fair enough, but we have been told repeatedly that we are safer today than we were on 9/11.
That argument basically relied on the absence of a similar attack since then.
But you logic fans will surely recognize that is just as likely to be in spite of the Iraq War and not because of it.
Plus, what did you think would happen to Islamic radicalism when we invade and stay in (I know people hate the word "occupy") a Muslim country?
Anyway it's true that you can just take the long view, but this would definitely undercut even more administration claims about the war.
FYI- Drudge just had a link to a White House claim that this morning's news stories did not reflect the whole opinion in the NIE report. So whoever commented here that the leak may have sprung a trap for the NYT- perhaps you were right.
A trap for the NYT, you say?
So, the NIE concludes that the Iraq War is, miraculously, decreasing the intensity of Islamic fanaticism. But, rather than leak the good news, pro-Bush sources leaked the opposite information to the Times and the Washington Post... just to make them look biased and irresponsible?
It's so fiendishly clever!
Liberals seem to want us to believe that al qaeda hated Saddam however, our invasion of their enemy inspired terrorism. Yet we invaded Al qaeda's home base in Afghanistan, overthrew their BFF in the form of the Taliban and continue to occupy solomn Muslim lands there with our Nato allies, and that doesn't piss off islamists?
We are led to believe that tossing out a far more secularist government and enemy to the Islamofascist cause, in Saddam, is a greater inspiration to the terrorists than the destruction of the Taliban who were their closest compatriots.
Ann says that she's moderate, but really she's just a Democratic shill on the payroll of Kos & Co... Just kidding. I couldn't resist given the bizarro comments of the last week.
I won't know what to think of the report until I can actually look at the report. Or at least until another source reports on it. I don't trust the NYT to report political news accurately.
I do agree with The Drill Sgt that it looks like a possible correlation = causation fallacy. The mere fact that the word "fueling" is used doesn't mean that someone didn't make that leap. I think a more likely cause of increased radicalism is that 9/11 was pulled off. When your side scores a conspicuous "victory" over the other side, you're more likely to have people who want to join up with you.
In any case, we haven't been attacked, and our current policies are focused on the long, not short, view. Long term I think we're much safer than we were when we ignored the cesspool of oppression in the Middle East.
seven, I suppose it depends on your definition of we, but attacks in Madrid, London, and Bali (? -- was that where the nightclub was bombed?) spring immediately to mind. I think there are a lot more terrorist attacks in Iraq, as well.
ALthouse, for shame.
The point of the whole 'safty' line is to give laymen like me an alleged reason. You fancy lawyers call that a PRETEXT.
For...
For...
For...
Establishing a military presence in the middle east.
You know this,
so, that considered, your approach here is propagandistic... shame, shame on you.
I suggest that you rename you blog to 'pravda USA'.
jk.
We aren't safer, but there wasn't really anything to be safe from in terms of Islamic terrorism, giving the neocons the shining excuse that 'hey, they haven't attacked us since 9/11, so these measures seem to be working'.
Eh, I give you the benefit of the doubt. You asked a good question here.
NYT, media bias aside, *possible* CIA/intellegence-community incompetence/bias aside, let's just assume the report is true. Let's assume that because we are in Iraq, and elsewhere, that we are stirring up more anger, and are therefore objectively less safe.
Even if it were true, we are still entirely justified in fighting terrorism. We are not responsible for the response to our actions, only our actions themselves. It seems obvious, but not to some, apparently. The wife who provokes her husband into shooting her is not guilty of her own death.
Do we sell our long-term security for short-term safety? You only need to look at history to see what happens to countries that do not vigorously defend themselves when challenged.
Doyle said...
"So, the NIE concludes that the Iraq War is, miraculously, decreasing the intensity of Islamic fanaticism. But, rather than leak the good news, pro-Bush sources leaked the opposite information to the Times and the Washington Post... just to make them look biased and irresponsible?"
Give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day; teach him to fish and he'll eat for life. Discredit the NYT...
Negroponte's statement from this afternoon:
"What we have said, time and again, is that while there is much that remains to be done in the war on terror, we have achieved some notable successes against the global jihadist threat."
He added, "The conclusions of the intelligence community are designed to be comprehensive and viewing them through the narrow prism of a fraction of judgments distorts the broad framework they create."
Hmmm. Wrong prism? Distorting the broad framework?
Doesn't sound like a stinging refutation to me.
Maxine's comment, the first in the thread, answered the question about as well as it can be answered.
We are safer in that Al Qaeda has been broken up, its financing disrupted and its training camps closed. Other than AQ in Iraq, it is not operational, but is simply a rallying cry. Also, although this gets almost no attention, a lot of its worldwide affiliates have also been broken up. They probably can't mount a multi-year, sophisticated plan like 9/11 again.
We are less safe because we are engaged in the region militarily. Unlike others, I don't think that our pulling out of the region would make the least bit of difference in how much "they" hate us or their determination to strike at us. But having American troops in Iraq does give them a target to hand and the ex-Baathists give them some infrastructure. Mass attacks on civilians, another 9/11 being unlikely, are likely to be like the plots broken up in London or Miami. Much more haphazard, much less professional and much more likely to be infiltrated, but not without danger.
I don't believe that home-grown terrorism connected to international support organizations, as we saw in London and Madrid, is any more likely now than before the Iraq invasion.
Iraq might, every once in a while, cause a nut to get into his SUV and drive through a crowd. Nothing we can do about that.
But what I really wanted to say is that I certainly hope that cedarford dies young of a truly painful disease.
Prior to 9-11 Iraq was ruled by totalitarian dictator who was raking in $30 billion a year to spend as he pleased. He wanted to build nuclear weapons and had tried to do so in the past. Today, he is dead, and no one has replaced him to reinstate the nuclear program.
Yes. We are safer.
"Would the NYT really run with this if there were a significant probability that when the report is published, these will look like unfair characterizations?"
That's the point of the criticism here. Nothing in a classified NIE, or more correctly nothing classified in an NIE, is going to be published in the foreseeable future, so they're pretty safe. From a political standpoint, maybe the Times really was played with a leak that can be refuted; more likely they live in a cocoon too thick for them to realize that keeping stuff like this in the news doesn't help the Dems.
"having American troops in Iraq does give them a target to hand and the ex-Baathists give them some infrastructure. Mass attacks on civilians, another 9/11[,] [are] unlikely."
Put another way, we're fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them over here. Right?
Doyle:
Your a dense SOB. Let's say you want to catch a rat- would you put a brick out for bait? Well, maybe you would but most people would use cheese or food a rat would eat.
It is the same if you wanted to see who was feeding the info to the NYT. To get the NYT to take the bait, it would have to be something they would eagerly print such as any top-secret bad news about Bush et al. So, the Bushies perhaps fed them bad news about Iraq to try to see who is feeding them the bait.
Got it numbskull?
It's all just an exercise in futility anyways. We'll never know if we are safer or not, whether the war(s) stalled, discovered, and/or thwarted plans or not, and whether the war(s) stirred up violence and hate that would not otherwise have been there.
I think the government could have made different choices that might have been better and thus safer, but I can't know that.
My guess is that the NIE was probably designed to look deeply at the "Are We Safer?" question and more deeply to find the answers tending towards no.
I don't think I would want the Intelligence and Law Enforcement Communities to get caught up in thinking about whether or not we are safer.
"We should have funded a new wave of teaching, as we did after Sputnik, to encourage not only critical science areas where US dominance is challenged or over with - but also training hundreds of thousands of Americans in critical languages like Arabic, Urdu, Chinese, Indonesian, Farsi along with cultural immersion...and also enlist native language speakers in translation, interface, and intelligence roles."
There you have it. Probably the clearest explanation from the Left as to why they keep losing elections.
The only surprise is that they are surprised they keep losing.
More to the point, in our history of warfare, especially the wars we won, our enemies always got larger (i.e., more numerous) before they got smaller (i.e., less numerous). Judging whether we are safer or not based upon the metric of known or probable jihadis is eminently suitable for the morons at the NY Times (with all due apologies to morons), but little use to anyone seriously analyzing the war.
Also, for those who think militant Islamic fascism is our fault, or that George Bush is a greater enemy than militant Islamic fascism, or that all that separates America from a lifetime theocratic dictatorship under George Bush is Hugo Chavez, Air America, Cindy Sheehan and the human tent-wearers of CodePink, than yeah, absolutely, taking the fight to our enemies is absolutely making us less safe. For sure.
Does anyone have a link to the actual document in question? I can't say that I trust the Times to accurately describe what it says.
Sometimes I wonder if I would have had a better life now if my SAT score in the eighties had been 1590, instead of the mediocre 1090 that it was. Would I be working for Google, Goldman Sachs or Harvard now? Would I be a lawyer at Skadden, Arps, or a hip UofW constitutional law professor, sharing an office with Ann, who would scold me about my black turtlenecks being too sexy and distracting for the female students? Would I be on the Forbes 400, just after the Waltons, but before Dell?
The problem with the "safer" question is that we are not God, and cannot determine the value of alternate paths or realities. As someone in an above post pointed out, the attack that we had to make (against Afghanistan) was probably the attack that would more likely offend the sensibilities of Islamic radicals (in comparison with the secular Iraqi regime).
Had we not invaded Iraq, would Al Queda not have found a home there with such a level of comfort that they could have organized and planned more attacks in an unrestrained, unhurried manner?
Who knows. It would seem to me that the consistent fixed variable is that some Islamic radicals always attack.
I would argue too, that if we were to disgengage from the Middle East, and leave them to their own devices, they would turn their attention toward "out of town" activities, fostering revolt among Islamic populations living in the West.
Does anyone have a link to the actual document in question? I can't say that I trust the Times to accurately describe what it says.
Uhhmm...no.
You see, the document is classified......it's supposed to be a secret.
The NYT is writing about a secret document that was leaked to it.
Instead of Iraq, we should have embarked on a major strategic communications and outreach effort to bring as many people to our side as possible, while beefing up the Air Force and Naval fleet Bush, Bush II, and Clinton have sheparded into major decline.
Good to know the proponents of Douhet are still alive and kicking...
No war has ever made the warring parties "safer" while the war was being waged. By that logic, Lincoln should have called it "even" after Gettysburg in 1863 (sparing the lives of hundreds of thousands of Union and Confederate troops), and Roosevelt should have "brought the troops home" after the Battle Midway in 1942 (which ended any possible threat to the U.S. mainland by the Japanese navy), sparing hundreds of thousands of American casualties and millions of Japanese military and civilian lives. This is not to argue that dragging out every war to the bloody end justifies the means--it's hard to say now what was actually "won" or "lost" between 1914 and 1918 by either side, and we'd probably all be better off if we'd have stayed out when the French bugged out of Vietnam. But I don't believe the current conflict falls into that category.
1. Does the Iraq war increase terrorism?
Look, it's a war. Surely, during a war, war-like events are to be expected. If not expected, whose brain-fart is at fault?
2. Are we safer now than on 9/11.
What is this, a tautology? Look at the track record. Of course, we're more safe. Are we completely invulnerable? Whose brain-fart would conjure up such idiocy?
3. If we experience a terror-event, does that make the DHIMMIcRATs right and GWB wrong? Nope. And, you can make a very cogent point that the DHIMMIcRATs have consistently, without let up, functioned as "on the other side", since 9/11. I believe the next terror event will be at least in part directly blameworthy on the DHIMMIcRATs.
Sometimes, I'm like "let's get out of there and let them kill themselves." Othertimes I'm like "let's just bomb the hell out of them, because they are scum and they deserve it."
This is the first and only comment I can remember coming from anyone who is against Bush and the war in Iraq who has actually expressed genuine, believable, disgust for the Islamo-fascists. DTL, I disagree with you a lot, but you get a lot of points for me on this one.
You see, the document is classified......it's supposed to be a secret. The NYT is writing about a secret document that was leaked to it.
Ah, I'd missed that.
Not worth paying any attention to, then.
we're still at war in iraq?
with who?
Oh, please! Do I have to face it now? Couldn't we have waterboarding class? OK; I don't have the time they do to read the AP.
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