At war, in denial

Sixteen U.S. intelligence agencies contributed to the NIE report that concludes Iraq "has become the cause célèbre for jihadists." Bush ignores them all.

By Sidney Blumenthal

Read more: Terrorism, Politics, Sidney Blumenthal, The New York Times, CIA, Opinion, Iraq War

Photo: Reuters/Jim Bourg

George W. Bush addresses a joint news conference at the White House Sept. 26, 2006.

Sept. 28, 2006 | President Bush's first response to the report in the New York Times was to ridicule it for having "guessed" that the classified National Intelligence Estimate titled "Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States" stated that the war in Iraq was a major inspiration for jihadist terrorism. His second response, in the ensuing clamor after he declassified the NIE's key judgments confirming the accuracy of the initial Times report, was to dismiss those who accepted the NIE's conclusions as "naive." His next reaction was to declare, "I agree with their [the NIE's] conclusion that because of our successes against the leadership of al-Qaida, the enemy is becoming more diffuse and independent" -- a cause and effect that is nowhere to be found in the NIE.

The collective product of the 16 U.S. intelligence agencies, the first on Iraq since the invasion in 2003, the NIE was delivered to the White House this April. "The Iraq conflict," it said, "has become the cause célèbre for jihadists, breeding a deep resentment of US involvement in the Muslim world and cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement." Not only is the Iraq war inspiring terrorism, but the jihadist movement has metastasized into spontaneously generated cells apart from the original al-Qaida organization, which itself is vastly reduced. In this struggle U.S. policy is inadequate to the task of containing terrorism's spread. "We assess that the underlying factors fueling the spread of the movement outweigh its vulnerabilities and are likely to do so for the duration of the timeframe of this Estimate."

The disclosure of parts of the NIE by the Times prompted Bush's angry denunciation of its public knowledge as little more than a partisan ploy. "And here we are," he railed, "coming down the stretch in an election campaign, and it's on the front page of your newspapers. Isn't that interesting? Somebody has taken it upon themselves to leak classified information for political purposes."

This latest episode indeed illumines the "political purposes" of intelligence, its suppression and distortion, and highlights the administration's intense pressures on the intelligence community, even in this NIE, whose findings on the consequences of the Iraq war have imploded Bush's carefully crafted rhetoric on terror.

Since Bush has possessed the NIE, he has spoken as though he had never received it. Yet, in the light of its revelation, it now seems that he was intent on refuting the report that the public did not know existed. "You know," said Bush at a press conference on Aug. 21, "I've heard this theory about everything was just fine until we arrived, and kind of 'we're going to stir up the hornet's nest' theory. It just doesn't hold water, as far as I'm concerned." Bush did not say where he had "heard this theory." Nor did he present evidence to oppose it. He simply asserted his authority against the phantom critic that unmasked turned out to be the entire intelligence community.

Once the NIE became known, Bush invented a conclusion in order to claim that any difficulties had their source in his success. He advanced a history of the past 20 years based on the tortured logic that because various acts of terror had happened in the absence of an invasion and occupation of Iraq, the invasion and occupation therefore could not be ascribed as a motive for terrorism now. "You know," he said, "to suggest that if we weren't in Iraq, we would see a rosier scenario with fewer extremists joining the radical movement requires us to ignore 20 years of experience. We weren't in Iraq when we got attacked on September the 11th."

Bush's sophistry obscured that he had received many warnings before the invasion that the consequences spelled out in the NIE would come to pass. His father's close associate, Brent Scowcroft, the elder Bush's national security advisor, who was a member of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board before he was booted out in 2005, told Bush in stark terms that an invasion would lead to sectarian violence within Iraq and stoke terrorism. Scowcroft was not alone. Other former associates of the elder Bush confided in me that they also told President Bush to his face the same things that Scowcroft had.

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