Spinning the NIE

The recent uproar surrounding the leaking of information from the National Intelligence Estimate -- and the subsequent partial declassification of the document by the Bush administration -- has brought to the fore one of the primary questions regarding the proper way to fight this "War on Terror".

In response to claims in the NIE and from critics that the war in Iraq has led to increasing numbers of terrorists and a greater threat of terrorism, Bush stated,

"We weren’t in Iraq when we got attacked on September 11. We weren’t in Iraq when thousands of fighters were trained in terror camps. We weren’t in Iraq when they first attacked the World Trade Center in 1993. We weren’t in Iraq when they bombed the Cole. We weren’t in Iraq when the blew up our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania."

Conservatives have repeatedly cited this as a firm rebuttal of the criticism that Iraq has hurt, rather than helped, in the fight against violent Islamic extremism. While it does establish that there was a substantial threat before the invasion of Iraq -- a fact that is not contested by critics of the war -- it fails to address the actual importance of the NIE's finding.

The criticism being brought up here is not that terrorism would cease to threaten America if not for America's military adventures abroad, but that the war in Iraq is having decidedly negative unintended consequences. These consequences include (among others) 1) inflaming hatred of America in the Arab world, which radicalizes poor, uneducated people and leads them to violence and 2) providing a massive terrorist training ground and networking tool in Iraq, where naive extremists become battle-hardened killers.

The first unintended consequence does not produce a terrorist threat where there wasn't one before, but it most certainly does help to expand it throughout the world -- many of the "home-grown" terrorist groups that have recently appeared in the West name the war in Iraq as a primary motivating factor for their resort to violence. The second consequence provides a thriving forum for aspiring terrorists to mature into well-connected, resourceful killers, much like petty criminals often emerge from prison as antisocial thugs. A very similar phenomenon has been well-studied by terrorism experts surrounding the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan in the 1980s, where the mujahideen established vast personal networks and shared bomb-making and insurgency know-how, forming the foundations for what would become al-Qaeda.

This is not to say that terrorists would not train, establish connections, or recruit new terrorists without an American presence in Iraq. However our presence most certainly does provide the impetus for the accelerated growth of terrorist networks on a much larger scale. The sharp increase in the number of global terrorist attacks and the proliferation of violent extremist ideology since the invasion in 2003 make it even more clear that the strategy of war in Iraq has worked against the security interests of the US.