Denial:

This article can be found on the web at

*http://www.thenation.com/doc/20061016/editors*

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Iraq and Reality

[from the October 16, 2006 issue]

Reality can be inconvenient. It can get in the way when politicians are

busy with bamboozlement. George W. Bush and his comrades-in-spin have

for years pitched their Iraq misadventure as the central front in the

"war on terror." We must fight them /there/ to prevent them from

fighting us /here/, goes their grade-school-level argument, cooked up to

replace the WMD argument (which lost its utility in the absence of

WMDs). But the recent disclosure of a classified National Intelligence

Estimate, first reported by the /New York Times/, has undercut that

justification. The NIE, finished in April, noted that Bush's invasion of

Iraq and the subsequent--inept and brutal--occupation has led to a rise

in Islamic radicalism that has increased the threat posed by global

jihadists. "The Iraq conflict has become the 'cause celebre' for

jihadists," the NIE says, "breeding a deep resentment of US involvement

in the Muslim world and cultivating supporters for the global jihadist

movement." To be blunt: Bush & Co. got it exactly wrong.

This is not, alas, very surprising. They have gotten everything about

Iraq wrong. And the tragedy is that they need not have. Before the war,

experts on terrorism and the Middle East raised the possibility (the

probability) that an invasion of Iraq would do more harm than good to

the Administration's effort to crush the murderous Al Qaeda and its

allies. It was hardly unforeseen that the invasion would sow suspicion

and anti-Americanism, which would be invaluable and exploitable for the

forces of bin Ladenism. In fact, before the invasion, as this magazine

argued--and as our colleague David Corn points out in his book /Hubris:

The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War/

(written with Michael Isikoff)--just about every problem and challenge

that has transpired in the wake of the invasion, from sectarian strife

to rampant violence and chaos, was predicted by policy experts within

the military, the State Department and the CIA. The Bush White House and

the civilian leaders of the Pentagon (Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz,

Douglas Feith) were uninterested in such reality-based policy work. They

ignored it because acknowledging such analysis would have been an

admission that they were about to engage in something other than a

cakewalk, a real drag on the sales campaign for the war.

So now one question is, Does this NIE, which notes that jihadists "are

increasing in both number and geographic dispersion," change anything?

An NIE is a consensus assessment of the intelligence agencies. The

report indicates that the government's best terrorism experts believe

the war is a factor in fueling the spread of jihadism. Experts can be

wrong; but such a judgment should have given Bush and his aides pause

and prompted a strategic review. The White House responded to the NIE

leak quickly--and predictably. It initially claimed the stories did not

convey the report's nuances. Only under pressure did it release excerpts

of the NIE, which indeed warns that the global jihadist movement is

spreading and that the war has contributed to this trend.

The White House declines to confront the implications of this

conclusion. There is a pattern here. Before the invasion, it refused to

see the holes in its case for war or the warnings of the chaos to come.

After the invasion, as Iraq slid toward civil war and bedlam, it

consistently declared that progress was being made. In September Bush

claimed he invaded Iraq because it was a "clear threat"--although it's

been demonstrated that Iraq had no unconventional weapons and no ties to

Al Qaeda. Throughout the Iraq endeavor, intelligence and analysis have

not mattered to Bush or his aides. The mission now is to keep

sidestepping such intrusions--all the way through election day.