The NIE and Iraq: What’s Missing from this Picture?

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Tons of intelligence reports exist about the windfall that the Iraq war has given to global Salafist jihad. The National Intelligence Council in 2005, for instance, called Iraq the new “breeding ground” for “professionalized” terror. An April 2006 NIE, which remains classified, plainly said the war “has made the overall terrorism problem worse,” as one intelligence official told the New York Times. It’s hard to see how this could be controversial: there would be no al-Qaeda in Iraq — which the National Intelligence Estimate today says “energize(s) the broader Sunni extremist community” — had there been no invasion.

Yet the declassified key judgments of the NIE don’t address Iraq — except for a few bizarrely constructed sentences. What gives with the NIE’s weaselly wording?

Here’s the sum total of what today’s NIE gives on Iraq’s relationship to al-Qaeda:

(W)e assess that al-Qa’ida will probably seek to leverage the contacts and capabilities of al-Qa’ida in Iraq (AQI), its most visible and capable affiliate and the only one known to have expressed a desire to attack the Homeland. In addition, we assess that its association with AQI helps al-Qa’ida to energize the broader Sunni extremist community, raise resources and to recruit and indoctrinate operatives, including for Homeland attack.

That’s some artful phrasing. What does it mean to “leverage the contacts and capabilities” of AQI for attacking the U.S. at home? Presumably, that members of AQI would become recruits for infiltration into the United States. Yet there’s not much in the way of evidence that AQI is sending operatives out of Iraq: the only known AQI field trip to date has been into Jordan for attacks, and that was under the helm of the since-killed Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who had his own vendettas.

That’s not to say it couldn’t happen. But when the NIE has to strain to find ways to tie AQI to possible domestic attacks, it’s probably a sign that AQI is otherwise preoccupied. The war itself is contributing a base of knowledge to the annals of jihad, spreading from Iraq and outwards, largely through the internet. (There’s an online magazine called, no kidding, Technical Mujahid.) That surely contributes to the domestic threat. What’s more, the line that AQI is “energizi(ing) the broader Sunni extremist community” isn’t really right, according to what we can tell from jihadist message boards. It’s the fact of the U.S. presence in Iraq that does that — AQI is unpopular among Iraqis, and the lionized jihadist in online circles is the Iraqi Sunni fighter who battles the U.S. as opposed to blowing up innocent civilians and Shiite mosques.

Indeed, the focus of the NIE is somewhat questionable. Over the last several years, jihadism has grown increasingly regional: not just with AQI, but with the new jihadist amalgamation in North Africa called al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, and (on the less-competent side) the rise of European Muslim jihadists like the ones who attacked in London and Glasgow recently. And there the Iraq war has had a catalytic effect, either on Europeans like 7/7 mastermind Mohammed Sidique Khan, who cited the Iraq war as a pretext for his attacks, or in terms of testing out new jihadist technology like IEDs for application in other theaters.

That’s a second-order threat from the perspective of homeland security, but a first-order threat in terms of understanding what al-Qaeda is in 2007 and defeating it. Between the lines here, the NIE appears to diminish the salience of President Bush’s argument that AQI will follow U.S. troops home, as opposed to contributing internet-distributed expertise for the next wave of al-Qaeda (or al-Qaeda-inspired) domestic attacks. If the NIE had focused on that broader contribution to terrorism emerging from the war — as opposed to AQI’s distinct role in it — a clearer picture of al-Qaeda might emerge.

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