We’ll be bringing you a lot more reporting through the day on the various intel reports on Iraq and the War on Terror. But I wanted to raise one point about the limited release from yesterday.
The upshot of the report, as I read it, is that over the last five years we’ve actually done a pretty good job at disrupting and dismantling al Qaida. (That includes everything from eliminating their safe haven in Afghanistan, to making it harder for them to move money and communicate electronically, and killing or capturing a great number of the key leaders.) The problem is that in Iraq we’ve managed to create a whole new rallying cry for a new generation of terrorists. And because they’re more dispersed, both organizationally and geographically, we’re really not prepared to handle the threat they pose.
I raise this point because this is actually very close to the argument that James Fallows made in his article in what I believe is still the current issue of The Atlantic. I strongly recommend you read the article. The deeper point is that Iraq is simply not a key part of the War on Terror, as the president routinely claims. We’ve actually done fairly well in the actual War on Terror, in the sense of taking down the organization that attacked us on 9/11. Simultaneously we’ve both squandered hundreds of billions of dollars and a lot of valuable time and good will creating a new threat with the fiasco in Iraq.
One other point: We’ve spent this morning getting to the bottom of a number of questions about this Iraq-specific NIE. And Justin Rood is about to post on that over at TPMmuckraker.com. The upshot is that there’s ample evidence the administration is slow-rolling the report to get it out past the November election.
Surprised?
Late Update: Harman writes to Negroponte.
