Another Week, Another Leak

That week, of course, being last week, and this post being meant for publication Saturday evening, and then Sunday afternoon, both the victims of runaway nap attacks. Maybe I'm coming down with narcolepsy or something.

Fortunately I've got more links than a cyclone fence, and last week's Enemy Media "gotcha" was more predictable than inseam wetness at a Sports Illustrated swimsuit photo shoot.

SUNDAY: The anti-Bush insurrections in the curiously named "intelligence community" leaks another classified document to their friends at the Washington Post and the New York Times. This time it is cherry-picked bullet points from last spring's National Intelligence Estimate purporting to show that the invasion and liberation of Iraq has damaged the GWOT by inspiring wave after wave after wave of new jihadists ready, willing, and eager to do battle to the death with the Great Satan. This - shazam! - just happens to fit precisely with the Democrats' idiotic meme that the Iraqi front (1) is not part of the GWOT and (2) the only way to regain the upper hand in this global struggle they think we've lost is to retreat from Iraq and surrender it to the terrorists. Donks across the country immediately jump on the "story" and wield it like a nerf truncheon in a pillow fight.

MONDAY: The purported "bombshell" promptly start to fizzle before the day (Sunday) is out. First the White House issues a statement declaring that the "report" was "not representative of the complete [NIE] document." The next day Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte follows that up with the following:

A National Intelligence Estimate is a comprehensive assessment comprised of a series of judgments which are based on the best intelligence our government develops. Characterizing only a small handful of those judgments distorts the broad strategic framework the NIE is assessing - in this case, trends in global terrorism.

TUESDAY: The calls begin for the Bush Administration to release the rest of the NIE to squash this press fabrication and humiliate the Democrats yet again. The chorus begins with Cap'n Ed and quickly rises to Texas Republican Senator John Cornyn.

WEDNESDAY: The White House declassifies all of the conclusions of the NIE. This provides, as Paul Harvey likes to say, "the rest of the story":

We assess that the Iraq jihad is shaping a new generation of terrorist leaders and operatives; perceived jihadist success there would inspire more fighters to continue the struggle elsewhere.

The Iraq conflict has become the "cause celebre" for jihadists, breeding a deep resentment of US involvement in the Muslim world and cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement. Should jihadists leaving Iraq perceive themselves, and be perceived, to have failed, we judge fewer fighters will be inspired to carry on the fight. [emphases added]

This is about as controversial - and deep - as the kiddie pool at Munchkin Land. Iraq is the central front in the GWOT because that is where we have a large contingent of troops fighting the Islamists. We liberated Iraq in part to make that a central front in the GWOT, and the enemy sees it that way as well. Defeat them there (as al Qaeda already has been) and the jihadis will, at worst, have a difficult time regrouping anywhere else (outside Wiziristan, anyway). Withdraw and we reinforce their contempt for us as being weak, decadent pushovers they can butcher at will anywhere, including the homeland.

Sunrise, sunset.

One can make the argument that it is not our presence in the battlefield in Iraq that is attracting jihadis, but the agitating of the Dem fifth column here at home that gets splattered all over the global media and encourages the enemy to keep fighting, believing that our cutting & running is just a matter of time. Witness Crazy Nancy Pelosi, the old bat who would be Speakeress, trying to drag the House into super-secret session to "discuss" the slanted NYT/WaPo "report" even after it had been exposed as a total fraud.

In point of fact, many were less than impressed with the NIE conclusions. Dean Barnett called it a "dud," "wondrously uninteresting" and "magnificently obtuse," as well as scrupulously avoiding the elephant in the birdcage of the role of Islam itself in breeding unholy warriors. Brother Hinderaker dismissed it as a "useless document....couched in such generalities that I don't see what use the President, or anyone else, could make of it for policy-making purposes."

That's probably why Dubya had no problems with declassifying most of it - there wasn't any "intel" of sufficient value worth protecting. Almost makes you wonder whether this was another Karl Rove sting operation - if, you know, Karl The Great did that sort of thing.

It certainly gave the President another chance to demonstrate the difference between the two parties on national security:

You know, to suggest that if we weren't in Iraq, we would see a rosier scenario with fewer extremists joining the radical movement requires us to ignore twenty years of experience. We weren't in Iraq when we got attacked on September the 11th. We weren't in Iraq, and thousands of fighters were trained in terror camps inside [Afghanistan]. We weren't in Iraq when they first attacked the World Trade Center in 1993. We weren't in Iraq when they bombed the Cole. We weren't in Iraq when they blew up our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. My judgment is, if we weren't in Iraq, they'd find some other excuse, because they have ambitions. They kill in order to achieve their objectives.

You know, in the past, Osama bin Laden used Somalia as an excuse for people to join his jihadist movement. In the past, they used the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It was a convenient way to try to recruit people to their jihadist movement. They've used all kinds of excuses.

This government is going to do whatever it takes to protect this homeland. We're not going to let their excuses stop us from staying on the offense. The best way to protect America is defeat these killers overseas so we do not have to face them here at home. We're not going to let lies and propaganda by the enemy dictate how we win this war. [emphases added]

Could the President have been slyly referring to the enemy within? That's how I would have intended those words.

Note, if you will, the incredulity of Afghan President Karzai when it was his turn to address this topic:

They came to America on September 11th, but they were attacking you before September 11th in other parts of the world. We are a witness in Afghanistan to what they are and how they can hurt. You are a witness in New York. Do you forget people jumping off the 80th floor or 70th floor when the planes hit them? Can you imagine what it will be for a man or a woman to jump off that high? Who did that? And where are they now? And how do we fight them, how do we get rid of them, other than going after them? Should we wait for them to come and kill us again? That's why we need more action around the world, in Afghanistan and elsewhere, to get them defeated - extremism, their allies, terrorists and the like. [emphasis added]

The difference between Democrats and everybody else is that the latter recognizes the reality that we are at war and must win it as swiftly and efficiently as possible, whereas the Democrats don't want to be at war so badly that they pretend it doesn't exist, insist with totalitarian fervor that everybody else delude themselves thusly, and maniacly condemn resistance to the enemy as being "dangerous." To fight the war is to lose it, to quit the war is to win it - or, in the Donk rhetorical formulation, "make Americans safer."

It is, in a word, insanity. And if implemented it will get many more of us killed.

True to the waggish definition of insanity as trying the same failure over and over and over in the vain hope that it will eventually succeed, the Democrats STILL wouldn't let go of this angle. One sentence summed it up:

The American people deserve the full story [of the NIE], not those parts of it that the Bush Administration selects," said Senator Edward M. Kennedy, D-MA

Let's give Rocketman the penultimate word:

That would be hilarious, if it were not so contemptible. When Democrats in the bureaucracy illegally leaked misleading portions of the NIE's "key judgments" in hopes of influencing the election, that was fine with Kennedy. But when the Administration declassified the entire "judgments" section so that the American people can read it all and judge for themselves, now Kennedy complains that the voters aren't getting "the full story." Absolutely outrageous, but typical of the Democrats' ever more hysterical campaign.

In plain, non-Vulcan English, Uncle Teddy is accusing the Bushies of....cherry-picking the NIE report!

It's like Ron White says: You can't fix stupid - in any sense of the term.