Soccer Dad: Accepting a flawed premise

September 27, 2006

Accepting a flawed premise

David Ignatius talks about the Big question the Democrats are ducking regarding the National Intelligence Estimate.

Here's a reality check for the Democrats: There is not a single government in the Middle East, with the possible exceptions of Iran and Syria, that favors a rapid U.S. pullout from Iraq. Why? The consensus in the region is that a retreat now would have disastrous consequences for America and its allies. Yet withdrawal is the Iraq strategy you hear from most congressional Democrats, whether they call it "strategic redeployment" or something else.

The problem is that Ignatius's premise is that the information in the NIE says exactly what the NY Times reported that it meant. Well as Robert Kagan pointed out yesterday

It's too bad we won't get to see the full National Intelligence Estimate on "Trends in Global Terrorism" selectively leaked to The Post and the New York Times last week. The Times headline read "Spy Agencies Say Iraq War Worsens Terrorism Threat." But there were no quotations from the NIE itself, so all we have are journalists' characterizations of anonymous comments by government officials, whose motives and reliability we can't judge, about intelligence assessments whose logic and argument, as well as factual basis, we have no way of knowing or gauging. Based on the press coverage alone, the NIE's judgment seems both impressionistic and imprecise. On such an important topic, it would be nice to have answers to a few questions.

While I give Ignatius a little credit for being more serious about Iraq than most Democrats, he is too credulous of the Times's (and Post's) reporting about the NIE. As Kagan observed

For instance, what specifically does it mean to say that the Iraq war has worsened the "terrorism threat"? Presumably, the NIE's authors would admit that this is speculation rather than a statement of fact, since the facts suggest otherwise. Before the Iraq war, the United States suffered a series of terrorist attacks: the bombing and destruction of two American embassies in East Africa in 1998, the terrorist attack on the USS Cole in 2000, and the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Since the Iraq war started, there have not been any successful terrorist attacks against the United States. That doesn't mean the threat has diminished because of the Iraq war, but it does place the burden of proof on those who argue that it has increased.

And Jack Kelly has argued

One can believe (as I do) that Iraq "has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism" without believing the Iraq war has been, on balance, a liability in the war on terror. Those foreign jihadists who go to Iraq, survive and return home pose a greater threat than they otherwise would have. But Iraq also has been the graveyard of thousands of jihadists, among them some of al Qaida's best.

And the "overall threat of terrorist attacks" likely would have grown after Sept. 11 even if there had been no war in Iraq; arguably more so, because the jihadists engaged in Baghdad and Ramadi could not simultaneously be in New York or Chicago.

Attacking our enemies does tend to make them angrier. But they were angry enough to start with, and failing to respond to their attacks can have worse consequences than defeating them in battle.

It is an article of faith among Democrats and the MSM that the war in Iraq was a mistake. While it's pretty clear that mistakes were made in the execution of the war it doesn't mean that the war was wrong.

It also doesn't mean that every criticism of the war is correct.

But for most Democrats the war is an issue and that means accepting every criticism at face value because it damages the Republicans politically.

Had Ignatius been more careful in what he accepted of the reporting of the NIE he would have been on more solid ground in criticizing the Democrats. His lack of skepticism costs him a lot in terms of credibility.

Technorati tags: National Intelligence Estimate, Iraq, War on Terror.