NIE says Iraq War made terrorism worse.
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.
The intelligence estimate, completed in April, is the first formal appraisal of global terrorism by United States intelligence agencies since the Iraq war began, and represents a consensus view of the 16 disparate spy services inside government. Titled \ufffdTrends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States,\ufffd\ufffd it asserts that Islamic radicalism, rather than being in retreat, has metastasized and spread across the globe.
An opening section of the report, \ufffdIndicators of the Spread of the Global Jihadist Movement,\ufffd cites the Iraq war as a reason for the diffusion of jihad ideology.
The report \ufffdsays that the Iraq war has made the overall terrorism problem worse,\ufffd said one American intelligence official.
More than a dozen United States government officials and outside experts were interviewed for this article, and all spoke only on condition of anonymity because they were discussing a classified intelligence document. The officials included employees of several government agencies, and both supporters and critics of the Bush administration. All of those interviewed had either seen the final version of the document or participated in the creation of earlier drafts. These officials discussed some of the document\ufffds general conclusions but not details, which remain highly classified.
[...]
The estimate concludes that the radical Islamic movement has expanded from a core of Qaeda operatives and affiliated groups to include a new class of \ufffdself-generating\ufffd cells inspired by Al Qaeda\ufffds leadership but without any direct connection to Osama bin Laden or his top lieutenants.
It also examines how the Internet has helped spread jihadist ideology, and how cyberspace has become a haven for terrorist operatives who no longer have geographical refuges in countries like Afghanistan.
In early 2005, the National Intelligence Council released a study concluding that Iraq had become the primary training ground for the next generation of terrorists, and that veterans of the Iraq war might ultimately overtake Al Qaeda\ufffds current leadership in the constellation of the global jihad leadership.
But the new intelligence estimate is the first report since the war began to present a comprehensive picture about the trends in global terrorism.
In recent months, some senior American intelligence officials have offered glimpses into the estimate\ufffds conclusions in public speeches.
\ufffdNew jihadist networks and cells, sometimes united by little more than their anti-Western agendas, are increasingly likely to emerge,\ufffd said Gen. Michael V. Hayden, during a speech in San Antonio in April, the month that the new estimate was completed. \ufffdIf this trend continues, threats to the U.S. at home and abroad will become more diverse and that could lead to increasing attacks worldwide,\ufffd said the general, who was then Mr. Negroponte\ufffds top deputy and is now director of the Central Intelligence Agency.
For more than two years, there has been tension between the Bush administration and American spy agencies over the violence in Iraq and the prospects for a stable democracy in the country. Some intelligence officials have said that the White House has consistently presented a more optimistic picture of the situation in Iraq than justified by intelligence reports from the field.
The broad judgments of the new intelligence estimate are consistent with assessments of global terrorist threats by American allies and independent terrorism experts.
The panel investigating the London terrorist bombings of July 2005 reported in May that the leaders of Britain\ufffds domestic and international intelligence services, MI5 and MI6, \ufffdemphasized to the committee the growing scale of the Islamist terrorist threat.\ufffd
More recently, the Council on Global Terrorism, an independent research group of respected terrorism experts, assigned a grade of \ufffdD+\ufffd to United States efforts over the past five years to combat Islamic extremism. The council concluded that \ufffdthere is every sign that radicalization in the Muslim world is spreading rather than shrinking.\ufffd
:-(
There was a discussion on C-Span a few minutes ago, originally broadcast on Monday the 18th, on the occasion of the 218th anniversary of the Constitution. The video is here:
rtsp://video.c-span.org/15days/e091806_claremont.rm (Real Video - 90 minutes)
Christopher Hitchens and William Kristol were on the panel. Another panelist, Mark Helprin, cited some of the old statistics about the defense budget as a percentage of GDP. Whether you agree with him that it should be higher than it is now, it's hard to argue with his comment that if the country is at war and that it's critical that we win the war, then we should be willing to spend much more to get the job done. The fact that we're not being asked to pay more to allow larger troop deployments, or to permit new peacekeeping deployments in Darfur or Lebanon or ... (if they're needed), is telling.
Cheers,
Scott.