Free at Last -- Not!

The Bush administration evidently was so chastened by TMcD and Madison it has swiftly freed and declassified parts of the April 2006 NIE judgments. There is one particularly purple passage – I see numerous news sites are especially zeroing in on it: The Iraq conflict has become the “cause celebre” for jihadists.... But having read through the 4-page document, which appears to me to be a somewhat truncated NIE in comparison to others I’ve read in the past (especially 2002), I would have to say that this document provides more cover for Bush’s Iraq War than it blows. The entire paragraph reads:

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.

Undoubtedly the right-wingers will point to this and say the inverse must also be true: Should jihadists perceive themselves, and be perceived, to have been victorious, then more fighters will be inspired to carry on the fight, ergo, we must stay and fight. The logic of this astounds me, not because it isn't internally consistent, but because behind it lurks a false premise, namely that we can still actually win in Iraq. Since the chances of this are not appreciably greater than zero, the only thing we can do by starying there is create more terrorists. And by staying and continuing to bleed and lose ground we also embolden and create more terrorists. This may be obvious to some of you or me, but not to Bush nor to his partisans. In short, this version of the NIE, none of which is blacked out (meaning it is a free-standing, watered-down document and not the actual estimate) links success against the jihadists with success in Iraq and you can’t have success in Iraq if you “cut and run.” Bush could not have asked for more. It reminds me of the budget document that was released a couple of weeks ago that said how horrible the deficit and economic outlook for the US was, and then went on to blame this horrible outlook on social security and entitlement programs rather than out of control military spending or tax cuts.

It will be interesting to see how this document will be perceived in the election, but previous experience suggests to me that the Republicans, who seem to revel in taking any piece of shit and polishing it up to look like gold, will have the upper hand, unless the second known intelligence estimate (and probably the more accurate and full one) is also published and does not make the false link between staying in Iraq and having ultimate success against the jihadists.