Having learned a few lessons, the pros who will be fighting this war long after the Bush appointees have left town grapple with the mess those appointees have wrought:
The [classified National 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 “Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States,’’ it asserts that Islamic radicalism, rather than being in retreat, has metastasized and spread across the globe.
An opening section of the report, “Indicators of the Spread of the Global Jihadist Movement,” cites the Iraq war as a reason for the diffusion of jihad ideology.
The report “says that the Iraq war has made the overall terrorism problem worse,” said one American intelligence official.
No shit, made it worse? Huh.
National Intelligence Estimates are the most authoritative documents that the intelligence community produces on a specific national security issue, and are approved by John D. Negroponte, director of national intelligence. Their conclusions are based on analysis of raw intelligence collected by all of the spy agencies.
Analysts began working on the estimate in 2004, but it was not finalized until this year. Part of the reason was that some government officials were unhappy with the structure and focus of earlier versions of the document, according to officials involved in the discussion.
Uh oh. Shades of Darth Cheney. And who is reassured by this:
"It's a very candid assessment," one intelligence official said yesterday of the estimate... . "It's stating the obvious."
Normally, you wouldn't think it takes candor to state the obvious. The implication is that some people involved in the process found it highly unpleasant just to acknowledge reality. If so, what does it take to state the subtle or inconspicuous? But then:
[I]ntelligence officials involved in preparing the document said its conclusions were not softened or massaged for political purposes.
Whew. It must be true, or they wouldn't print it. I feel so much better now. I mean, as bad as it is, the truth couldn't possibly be worse. Could it? Let's hold that thought and see how bad the report says it is:
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 “self-generating” cells inspired by Al Qaeda’s leadership but without any direct connection to Osama bin Laden or his top lieutenants.
Oooh, that sounds bad.
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’s current leadership in the constellation of the global jihad leadership.
Okay, okay. So all 16 of the American intelligence agencies say it's very bad. Maybe they're all run by liberals. What do other people say?
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’s domestic and international intelligence services, MI5 and MI6, “emphasized to the committee the growing scale of the Islamist terrorist threat.”
More recently, the Council on Global Terrorism, an independent research group of respected terrorism experts, assigned a grade of “D+” to United States efforts over the past five years to combat Islamic extremism. The council concluded that “there is every sign that radicalization in the Muslim world is spreading rather than shrinking.”
Definitely extremely bad. Maybe .... just maybe, we shouldn't have invaded Iraq. Okay, I knew you were smart readers, you already figured that out. But the central question isn't assigning blame for shitting the bed, but whether people understand why the Iraq invasion was counterproductive:
The latest terrorism assessment paints a portrait of a global war in which Iraq is less the central front of actual combat than a unifying battle cry for disparate extremist groups and even individuals. "It is just those kinetic actions that lead to the radicalization of others," a senior counterterrorism official said earlier this summer. "Surgical strikes? Nothing is surgical about military operations. They tend to have impacts, affects [sic]."
That description contrasts with Bush's emphasis this month on offensive military action in Iraq and elsewhere as the United States' principal road to victory in the global war.
"Many Americans . . . ask the same question five years after 9/11," he said in a speech in Atlanta earlier this month. "The answer is yes. America is safer. We are safer because we have taken action to protect the homeland. We are safer because we are on the offensive against our enemies overseas. We're safer because of the skill and sacrifice of the brave Americans who defend our people."
But "a really big hole" in the U.S. strategy, a second counterterrorism official said, "is that we focus on the terrorists and very little on how they are created. If you looked at all the resources of the U.S. government, we spent 85, 90 percent on current terrorists, not on how people are radicalized."
"A really big hole." That's a pretty good description of the thinking of Bush and his conservative supporters, who will misunderstand this report, too. Wide-eyed innocents all, they will say with hurt expressions that they only were trying to spread democracy:
"Our peoples have a keen interest in the achievement of a larger measure of democracy, human rights and political reform," said Ahmed Aboul Gheit, foreign minister of Egypt, which receives more than $2 billion in annual aid from the United States. "However, we now see that some seek to impose these concepts by military force. They proceed from the assumption that their principles, values and culture are superior and thus worthy of being imposed on others."
You can just imagine right-wing bloggers struggling to find a polite way to say, "If some Egyptian camel jockey wants respect, maybe Egypt shouldn't have attacked us on 9/11." These are people, after all, who probably flunked chemistry and physics and don't understand what that intelligence official meant by "kinetic actions". When you just dump energy into a system without understanding how components interact, you can end up with very negative spillover effects, such as radicalizing moderate Muslims who were previously somewhat sympathetic to us, or disaffecting non-Muslims in completely different parts of the world:
As [Venezuelan President Hugo] Chavez put it in his fiery speech [to the UN General Assembly], which was greeted by wild applause in the chamber: "They say they want to impose a democratic model. But that's their democratic model. It's the false democracy of elites, and, I would say, a very original democracy that's imposed by weapons and bombs and firing weapons. What a strange democracy. . . . What type of democracy do you impose with Marines and bombs?"
...
In his speech, Chavez sarcastically referred to Bush's rhetorical device of speaking directly to people in some countries, such as Lebanon.
"He spoke to the people of Lebanon. Many of you, he said, have seen how your homes and communities were caught in the crossfire," Chavez said. "How cynical can you get? What a capacity to lie shamefacedly [sic]. The bombs in Beirut with millimetric precision? This is crossfire? He's thinking of a western, when people would shoot from the hip and somebody would be caught in the crossfire. This is imperialist, fascist, assassin, genocidal -- the empire and Israel firing on the people of Palestine and Lebanon. That is what happened."
Bush says we're safer because we're on the offensive overseas, like we were first and goal on the enemy's five yard line, when our adversaries are playing chess and know that a player who is too aggressive leaves himself wide open to attack. If this were football, America would be the richest franchise who is always in the Super Bowl, subject to carping by weaker teams:
"I think that there is perhaps more of an inclination to vent those emotions here because they think they are more likely to get a positive reception," U.S. Ambassador John R. Bolton told reporters Friday. "But I think that behavior doesn't do them any credit, and it certainly doesn't benefit the United Nations."
Oooh, dismissive. Which, in a nutshell, is Red America. To them, understanding other countries is what you do when you can't force them to do what you want. Even asking "what effect will our actions have?" smacks too much of "why do they hate us?", when every red-blooded American knows that any opposition to America is caused by anti-Americanism, and the only way to answer anti-Americanism is with bullets. You're either with us or you're dead, motherfucker. Any other response is effeminate, French:
"You may believe yourself stronger because you have your own values of strength," [Philippe Douste-Blazy, France's foreign minister,] said in an interview, referring to the United States. "But for others there are other values. Therefore, I believe what is essential and ideal is to have respect of others and therefore knowledge of others. That is why the clash of civilization is in fact a clash of ignorance."
That kind of stuff just grinds the right-wingers' gears, because it's the United States of America, the greatest nation in the history of Earth, that gets to decide who deserves respect and who does not:
Smaller nations resent the proliferation of annual report cards issued by the State Department, often under congressional mandate, that grade countries on how well they observe human rights, allow the practice of religion, combat drugs and other issues.
Last Monday, the State Department issued its list of countries that are major suppliers, producers or transporters of narcotics, and once again Bolivia was on the list. The next day, Bolivia's president, Evo Morales, held up a coca leaf during his speech to the General Assembly and denounced what he called a "neo-imperialist" approach to coca eradication. "With all respect to the government of the United States, we are not going to change anything," Morales said. "We do not need blackmail or threats."
Now there's a kinetic effect for you: The opium supply is already in the hands of people who can use their profits to fund some of those "self-generating cells." What if the countries who profit from the cocaine trade also twig to the idea that diverting a small amount of drug profits can keep America pinned down on the other side of the globe? Coke money funded arms purchases for the Contras, as did the profits on the sale of arms to Iran that that sprang the American hostages, and it doesn't take a whole of imagination to see how a little Central American drug money could make things tougher for us in the Middle East. And it's even easier when through ignorance America helps smaller countries make common cause against us.
So, what are we left with? We were right, they were wrong. We said by invading Iraq Bush would drive the country's security into a ditch, and it did. We knew it before the invasion, we knew it as the statue of Saddam was toppled, and slowly people who didn't know it are learning. The NIE report is a good step. But the fact that some people in government are wising up doesn't mean that the others who still think the Iraq war is peachy will. Nor will it make the people who voted for Bush any smarter. Convincing someone of something is tricky at best when that person is delusional, and a good chunk of the population suffers from the firmly held false idea that American actions are obviously beneficent. To them, information is noise, something to be discounted lest it distract them from using ever more force to get their way - from dumping more energy into the reaction that is already blowing up in our faces.
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