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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: geode00 who wrote (204477)	9/27/2006 4:16:44 PM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Terror report hard for Bush team to refute ____________________________________________________________ 16 intelligence agencies say Iraq war has only made matters worse BY TOM TEEPEN Columnist Cox News Service President Bush and his ceaselessly, seamlessly partisan government are working 24/7 to shift the focus of the congressional elections from the Iraq war, on which Republicans poll poorly, to the "war on terrorism," on which they poll a good bit better. But while de-linking them on the one hand, Bush et al., on the other hand insist that Iraq is the front line in the war on terror -- a difficult contortion even for an administration as athletically dodgy as this one. Political script derailed Then, POW! Here comes a leaked analysis by the National Intelligence Council that recouples the issues and in a way that is devastating to the Bushite political script.The report's central conclusion: The war in Iraq has been and continues to be a strong rallying point for Islamic extremists of every stripe, helping to train fighters, spread anti-American and anti-Western sentiment among Muslims and spark the spontaneous creation of terrorist cells unaffiliated with any large terrorist organization and thus all the more difficult to defend against. The new estimate, dating from last April but just shaken loose by The New York Times, is the first by the NIC since March of '03. It represents the studied findings of the nation's 16 intelligence agencies. As such, it is presumably bulletproof from the witty rejoinders Bush and his conservative claque have hurled at others who have been making the same points. It is going to be a real trick to cast the nation's intelligence agencies as Bush-haters who always blame America first, give succor to the enemy and want to cut and run. The agencies say that U.S. pursuit has decimated al-Qaida's leadership and disrupted the survivors' planning, but they find that nonetheless the terrorist threat over-all has grown, thanks to the provocations of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. Terrorist threat has grown This war, misbegotten and utterly botched, has been a disaster for the United States in even more ways that its perverse incitement to increased terrorism. Refusing to ask us to pay for this costly, counter-productive adventure, the administration chose instead to run the country into record debt -- at the same time doling out big tax cuts to the nation's richest. It has degraded the U.S. military to the point where a large part is no longer combat-ready. The Pentagon has turned time after time to the National Guard and reserves to take up duties for which their service was never intended, at least not to anything like this degree. We have lost allies and have seeded skepticism and disgust abroad that could undermine the international intelligence cooperation that is the real front in the contest with Islamic jihadists and their state protectors. The true nuclear menaces -- Iran, North Korea -- understand perfectly that we no longer wield the authority nor field the forces to confront them effectively short of starting a nuclear war ourselves. All this to attack Iraq and Saddam Hussein, which Bush himself now concedes had nothing -- not one damn thing -- to do with the murderous airliner attacks five years ago. We have spent lives, treasure, respect, authority and our military only to make matters worse. *Tom Teepen is a columnist for Cox Newspapers. He is based in Atlanta. E-mail: teepencolumn@earthlink.net.