National Intelligence Estimate

[Since I'm apparently blogging again tonight, this is a version of a comment I posted on someone else's blog a few days ago. I've modified it slightly, but the core message is the same. --Liam]

Something that frustrated me recently was the response to the recently leaked national security estimate. That document makes it clear that our campaign in Iraq has made terrorism worse and made the U.S. less safe, at least in the estimation of those whose job it is to know.

This mirrors what other people-in-the-know such as former "terrorism czar" Richard Clarke have said all along, even before we started in Iraq.

The frustration comes in when someone from the Administration, responding to those charges, "reminds" us that we weren't in Iraq on 9/11. This is a logical falacy because no one has said Iraq created terrorism, only that it has made it worse.

It has been widely reported that in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, al Qaeda lost a lot of support in the Muslim world. A lot of people who didn't particularly like the United States nevertheless said "Well damn, this killing of thousands of people and flying planes into buildings, this is not something I can support", and al Qaeda was reportedly waning significantly. Our initial fair and measured response in Afghanistan did little to damage our standing nor help that of al Qaeda.

Then came Iraq, which everyone except the talking heads on the Right and their associated non-thinking "ditto-heads" knew was unfounded, un-supportable and ill advised. Congress never authorized that war, it was undertaken by the Administration under the assumption that it fell under the broad anti-terrorism powers that had previously been granted by the Congress. In the years since, al Qaeda has had a huge resurgence while we have fallen in world view to a point far lower than in the years immediately before the 9/11 attacks.

So what does it matter that we were attacked before we went into Iraq?

To use one of my famous analogies, if I catch a stomach flu and just as it starts to get better, I go out and locate and eat a batch of bad clams, it is clear that my eating of old seafood will make my digestive symptoms worse. It is also clear that I initially got sick well before I ever ate the clams. But the Administration's argument amounts to saying that because of the prior bout with nausea, the clams didn't make things worse, or that somehow the clams were a good idea in response to the earlier illness.

The argument relies on a slippery little bit of substitution. They can't argue against the facts (our war in Iraq has made terrorism worse and America less safe), so they argue against a statement that was NOT made (that somehow going into Iraq created anti-American sentiment and tus created terrorism) and hope that most people will be too stupid (or too lazy) to recognize that they've made a really good argument against an argument no one ever made, while completely omitting any response to the actual charge, that they've made Americans less safe.

Liam.