NIE beat-up

PRIME Minister John Howard has welcomed the declassifying of a United States intelligence report that says Iraq has become a gathering point for global Islamic extremists. The Banshees have welcomed the report as well, as buried within, there are paragraphs that can be spun as anti Bush/Howard etc and can be used to poor scorn on the entire idea of the war in Iraq. And one wonders at the motivation for leaking the selective pages and why weren’t other pages leaked. In fact, why wasn’t the entire report leaked? It couldn’t be because the rest of the report wasn’t as negative…could it?….no way. In my time, when serving under The Official Secrets Act it was worth seven years in goal to do what these guys have done. I presume the US have something similar and they are being pursued with the full force of the law and will eventually face dismissal and goal time…hope so anyway. In Australia, ‘Tricky’ Rudd says;

……the report showed the Howard government’s arguments for taking Australia to war in Iraq were flawed. “The release of this document fundamentally torpedoes John Howard’s credibility and the argument he gave Australia for going to war in Iraq,” Mr Rudd told reporters.

It does? How? The bottom line is that it is an extract from an intelligence summary and during the course of a war all such documents have both negative and positive aspects otherwise they’re not true summaries of the situation. Of course the Terrorists are more active since we attacked them. That’s what happens and they will try and maintain their momentum as we do ours. During WW2 these type of assessments would have been negative as well. Just think North Africa before Rommel lost it, or the Pacific for three years from 1942 to ’45. A beat-up. UPDATE:  From this morning’s Opinion Journal; The New York Sun has some good news:

On a day when much of the capital’s attention was focused on leaked excerpts of an intelligence estimate report that suggested the Iraq war was creating more jihadists, the military quietly released an intercepted letter from Al Qaeda complaining that the terrorist organization was losing ground in Iraq. The letter, found in the headquarters of Al Qaeda’s leader in Iraq, Abu-Musab al-Zarqawi, after he was killed on June 7, was sent to Zarqawi by a senior Al Qaeda leader who signs his name simply “Atiyah.” He complains that Al Qaeda is weak both in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region and in Iraq. . . . “Know that we, like all the Mujahidin, are still weak,” he wrote in the letter dated December 11, 2005. “We are in the stage of weakness and a state of paucity. We have not yet reached a level of stability. We have no alternative but to not squander any element of the foundations of strength, or any helper or supporter.”

In fact, the NIE summary begins by noting that “United States-led counterterrorism efforts have seriously damaged the leadership of al-Qa’ida and disrupted its operations.” They conclude;

No one said this was going to be easy, and like any important and challenging undertaking, it requires patience and forbearance.

I’ll give George Bush the last word on the subject;

[He]…was clearly unhappy that findings from the National Intelligence Estimate had made their way into news reports. Noting that evidence-gathering for the assessment had been concluded in February, and that the report itself had been finished two months later, Mr. Bush said: “Here we are, coming down the homestretch of an election campaign and it’s on the front page of your newspapers. Isn’t that interesting?”