Undermining Mendacious Journalists

I'll add to Mitchell's commentary about the Times with an editorial from yesterday's Wall Street Journal. It utterly destroys the underhanded attempt by the Times, in this past Sunday's edition, to purposefully misinterpret the NIE's April 2006 report on the war. The Times claimed that the NIE proved that the Iraq war effort had not only done nothing to defeat terrorism, but has in fact made it worse.

The Bush Administration, of course, released a portion of the report, and it is unrecognizable as the document upon which the Times based its report. It was a wise move by the White House, as it removed the Times's principal weapon--unidentified sources who claimed to be familiar with the NIE's findings. And it's another excellent example of why this White House should declassify more documents, since only by doing so can they undermine the underminers.

From yesterday's WSJ:

National Intelligence Estimates are bland documents that represent the lowest-common-denominator judgment of more than a dozen intelligence agencies. We doubt they're very useful for policy makers, and they certainly aren't suitable for use as political cudgels in a national election.

But we now know that's exactly what a few leaking spooks, the New York Times and credulous Democrats just tried to do. Sunday's Times led with a story sourced to anonymous "intelligence officials" and headlined "Spy Agencies Say Iraq War Worsens Terrorism Threat." Democratic critics of the Iraq war promptly seized on the report. But now that President Bush has declassified the "Key Findings" of the April 2006 NIE on "Trends in Global Terrorism," we know this scoop was largely political spin. A more accurate headline would have been: "Spy Agencies Say Abandoning Iraq Would Worsen Terror Threat."

True, the NIE says post-Saddam Iraq has become a "cause celebre" for jihadists. But that's merely stating the obvious. Any U.S. intervention in the Mideast was going to provoke an extremist response. The more important statement in that same bullet point is: "Should jihadists leaving Iraq perceive themselves, and be perceived, to have failed, we judge fewer fighters will be inspired to carry on the fight."

In other words, it's abandoning Iraq that would be the huge mistake -- while success would be a major antiterror victory. This is a blunt rebuke of Democratic Representative Jack Murtha and his House allies, who want to replace U.S. troops in Iraq with an "over-the-horizon" force -- in Okinawa, as he once put it.

And what about the larger Democratic theme that the war in Iraq has been a "distraction" from the fight against al Qaeda? In its very first sentence, the NIE says "United States-led counterterrorism efforts have seriously damaged the leadership of al Qaeda and disrupted its operations." It also suggests dwelling on the failure to capture or kill Osama bin Laden is a mistake: "Countering the spread of the jihadist movement will require coordinated multilateral efforts that go well beyond operations to capture or kill terrorist leaders."

More broadly, the NIE seems to endorse addressing the root causes of terrorism through democracy promotion: "If democratic reform efforts in Muslim majority nations progress over the next five years, political participation probably would drive a wedge between intransigent extremists and groups willing to use the political process."

And: "Greater pluralism and more responsive political systems in Muslim majority nations would alleviate some of the grievances jihadists exploit. Over time, such progress, together with sustained, multifaceted programs targeting the vulnerabilities of the jihadist movement and continued pressure on al Qaeda, could erode support for the jihadists."

This is hardly earth-shattering stuff, we grant. But it sure sounds more like an affirmation of the Bush Administration's general approach to the war on terror than what the Times described when it quoted an unnamed "intelligence official" that "the Iraq war has made the overall terrorism problem worse."

But then anyone who understood the process of producing NIEs would never have made such a big deal about the document. President Bush could do himself, and the country, a favor if he reacted to this latest attempt to politicize NIEs by asking our spy agencies to stop producing them. Their focus should be more and better intelligence. They should leave the policy judgments to elected officials -- and the voters.