Bush and intelligence
HOWEVER grudgingly, President Bush did the right thing yesterday when he ordered declassified those parts of a National Intelligence Estimate that can be released without endangering intelligence sources or methods.
This is the consensus report from 16 intelligence agencies that concluded the war in Iraq has been used successfully by the jihadist movement to swell the ranks of terrorist groups. In announcing his decision, Bush complained that it had been leaked ``for political purposes." And indeed, the leaked portions were immediately taken up in partisan debates. Democrats contended that the leaked finding supported their criticism of the Iraq war. Republicans insisted that if all the report's conclusions were taken into consideration, they would bolster the administration's case for the seriousness of the war on terrorism and confirm that there have been some successes in fighting that war.
Whatever the declassified material discloses, Bush has only himself to blame for politicizing the issue of a connection between Iraq and the terrorist threat from violent Islamist groups. It was he who justified a preemptive war to overthrow Saddam Hussein by depicting it as part of a larger struggle against the terrorism of Al Qaeda and affiliated networks. Stop them there, or we'll have to fight them here, he said.
Bush's pairing of Saddam's secular police state with religious extremists seeking an Islamic caliphate in the mold of the Taliban regime was always a case of false advertising. A January 2003 report from the National Intelligence Council correctly predicted that the coming war would boost the world wide recruitment efforts of violent Islamist groups.
Bush is entitled to argue that the intelligence estimate delivered to him last April contained many conclusions about the terrorist threat that have nothing to do with the war in Iraq. He also has grounds for saying that some fraction of the violence perpetrated in Iraq today comes from jihadist forces linked, however tenuously, to Al Qaeda.
But it is not true that Al Qaeda was allied with Saddam before the war or that the prolonged US occupation of Iraq has diminished the appeal of jihadist ideology across the Muslim world. These are two falsehoods that Bush has been peddling for transparently political reasons.
It will be healthy for political discourse in the run-up to the November elections if the declassified National Intelligence Estimate clears the air of White House propaganda. The issue of what to do about Iraq will be hard enough to resolve without Bush's pretense that a key reason for prolonging the occupation of that Muslim country is to discourage jihadist groups preaching holy war against the crusader West. 