"Spy Agencies Say Iraq War Hurting U.S. Terror Fight"

Read the full article by Karen DeYoung, The Washington Post, September 24, 2006.

A 30-page National Intelligence Estimate completed in April cites the "centrality" of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and the insurgency that has followed, as the leading inspiration for new Islamic extremist networks and cells that are united by little more than an anti-Western agenda. It concludes that, rather than contributing to eventual victory in the global counterterrorism struggle, the situation in Iraq has worsened the U.S. position, according to officials familiar with the classified document.

Telling the boss what he doesn't want to hear is always hard. It is a lot harder when the boss is the President of the United States. John D. Negroponte, the Director of National Intelligence, and Thomas Fingar, who chairs the National Intelligence Council, deserve great credit for doing so.

"It's a very candid assessment," one intelligence official said yesterday of the estimate, the first formal examination of global terrorist trends written by the National Intelligence Council since the March 2003 invasion. "It's stating the obvious."

The NIE, whose contents were first reported by the New York Times, coincides with public statements by senior intelligence officials describing a different kind of conflict than the one outlined by President Bush in a series of recent speeches marking the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

"Together with our coalition partners," Bush said in an address earlier this month to the Military Officers Association of America, "we've removed terrorist sanctuaries, disrupted their finances, killed and captured key operatives, broken up terrorist cells in America and other nations, and stopped new attacks before they're carried out. We're on the offense against the terrorists on every battlefront, and we'll accept nothing less than complete victory."

Democracy works best when the voters have the information they need to make informed judgements. It is especially important that they have that information as they decide who to vote for in an election. When the party in power is spinning the information, and the spin is radically different from what the professionals in the bureaucracy belief, those professionals face a real problem. In this case, some have chosen to leak a classified document to the press, and to give background comments to the press. As the Wilson-Plame case shows, there were personal risks in doing so! Perhaps more important, "leaking" such information undermines the trust within the intelligence reporting system. This is a much harder thing than telling the boss what he doesn't want to hear. Still, as the WP said of the National Intelligence Estimate:

"It's stating the obvious."