Editorial: Iraq ‘snapshot’ pretty bleak

Thursday, Sept. 28, 2006 | 7:28 a.m.

A declassified segment of intelligence report only reinforces criticisms of president's war

President Bush and his top aides pulled their "damage control" cord Sunday after both The New York Times and The Washington Post revealed the existence of a classified federal report concluding that the Iraq war is one reason terrorism by Islamic fanatics is spreading.

The White House quickly responded that references to the Iraq war were only part of a much longer intelligence assessment. The urgency to minimize the newspapers' stories, which relied on confidential sources, was intensified by the nature of the report. It was a National Intelligence Estimate, the highest level of all reports that reach the president's ear, and one that represents the consensus of all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies.

If it were true that the report cited the Iraq war as a stimulus to terrorism, voters might not let the Bush administration and Republican congressional leaders off as easily as they did when they learned that none of the official reasons for starting the war was valid.

Under pressure from Republicans worried about midterm elections, Bush on Tuesday ordered that just under four pages of the 30-plus page report be declassified. He was hoping that the references to the Iraq war, read in partial context, would somehow salvage his administration's reputation.

We see just the opposite. Here is one passage in the report:

"The Iraq conflict has become the cause celebre for jihadists, breeding a deep resentment of U.S. involvement in the Muslim world and cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement." This is a declarative sentence, describing a real consequence of the war. It was followed by this sentence, one that Bush would like to play up, but which poses only a hypothetical scenario: "Should jihadists leaving Iraq perceive themselves, and be perceived, to have failed, we judge fewer fighters will be inspired to carry on the fight."

Any more such context and Bush will be undone.

We cannot imagine jihadists as perceiving themselves as failures, so far anyway. They are succeeding in blocking all of Bush's latest stated objectives in Iraq, which include establishing a strong, popular and pro-U.S. democracy, securing the country's borders, vanquishing rampaging militias, insurgents and terror groups, forging an alliance among the Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites, and rebuilding shattered infrastructure.

Nothing in the declassified segment provides any justification for the Iraq war, or any reason to be optimistic about its outcome - or the outcome of the overall war on terror - under Bush's policies. Now the White House is calling the report just a "snapshot" and not a conclusion. We hope voters bring about a change in leadership before this snapshot Bush has wrought becomes a poster for how to ignite anti-U.S. sentiment the world over.