Robert Kagan, wise as ever, has a a few questions about that leaked National Intelligence Estimate suggesting the war in Iraq has stirred up jihadism around the globe:
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.
For what it's worth, I don't find it hard to believe that the insurgency - as opposed to the invasion itself - has been a recruiting sergeant. After all, the post-war mess leaves America looking weak and indecisive. But Kagan asks the right question, surely:
There is, in addition to all this, a question of context. What should we do if we believe certain actions might inspire some people to become potential terrorists? Should we always refrain from taking those actions, or are there cases in which we may want to act anyway? We have pretty good reason to believe, for instance, that the Persian Gulf War in 1991, and the continuing presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia after the war, was a big factor in the evolution of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda. We are pretty sure that American support of the Afghan mujaheddin against the Soviet occupation forces in the late 1970s and early '80s also contributed to the growth of Islamic terrorism.
Knowing this, would we now say that we made a mistake in each of those cases? Would an NIE argue that we would be safer today if we had not helped drive the Soviets from Afghanistan or Saddam Hussein from Kuwait? The argument in both cases would be at least as sound as the argument about the most recent Iraq war.
[Via RealClearPolitics]
UPDATE: The NY Times has more on the details published with George Bush's blessing.