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Analysis: Intelligence Paper Fuels Political Fire

Council on Foreign Relations

September 27, 2006
Prepared by: Eben Kaplan

In a 2003 memo, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld posed the question “Are we capturing, killing, or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training, and deploying against us?” A newly declassified National Intelligence Estimate provides one of the most detailed answers to this question yet, saying the Iraq war has become “the ‘cause celebre’ for jihadists, breeding a deep resentment of U.S. involvement in the Muslim world and cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement.”

The Bush administration says it chose to release the document as a response to media coverage (WashPost) over the weekend based on leaked excerpts of the report. Announcing the declassification of the document, Homeland Security Adviser Frances Fargos Townsend seemed to chastise the media for publishing these earlier accounts, saying, “Every unauthorized disclosure of classified information does harm to our national and homeland security.” At the same time, the White House released another document that attempted to draw parallels between President Bush’s public statements and the report’s contents, but the New York Times finds the differences between public and classified accounts “unmistakable.” Lost in much of the coverage of the report are its few positive observations, such as the opening sentence, which notes, “United States-led counterterrorism efforts have seriously damaged the leadership of al-Qaeda and disrupted its operations.” But William M. Arkin, in his washingtonpost.com blog Early Warning, says that in the partisan bickering over the significance of the Intelligence Estimate, both sides are wrong. The report itself is flawed, writes Ivo Daalder, saying Bush’s real failure in the terror war has been Afghanistan.

Read the rest of this article on the cfr.org website.

Copyright 2006 by the Council on Foreign Relations. This material is republished on GlobalSecurity.org with specific permission from the cfr.org. Reprint and republication queries for this article should be directed to cfr.org.