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Iraq Is Making America Less Safe

President Bush ordered a portion of a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) discussing our war in Iraq and the war on terror to be publicly released yesterday. The NIE’s main conclusion is that while the administration’s efforts to capture and kill al Qaeda’s leaders have weakened and dispersed that organization, the war in Iraq is creating such resentment of the United States that the number of terrorists is growing more quickly than our ability to combat said terrorists.

Specifically, the Estimate’s authors “assess that the underlying factors fueling the spread of the [global jihadist] movement outweigh [the movement’s] vulnerabilities and are likely to do so for the duration of the timeframe of this Estimate”. According to this WashingtonPost.com article, the timeframe for this NIE is through early 2011.

Regarding Iraq, the authors describe the war as the “cause celebre” for terrorists and isolate it as one of the four underlying factors causing the global jihadist movement to spread. The other three factors are a sense of powerlessness in the wake of Western domination, the slow growth in quality of life in most Muslim countries, and the general anti-U.S. sentiment among most Muslims.

The report basically points out why “staying the course” in Iraq is such a bad idea. Either we need to throw a massively increased number of troops in Iraq to quell the violence and provide improved stability, or we need to transfer authority over to Iraqis and weaken the terrorist breeding ground we have created. “Staying the course” is trying to have our cake and eat it too, and it is having the obvious disastrous consequences.

David Ignatius at WashingPost.com proceeds to criticize the Democrats over the handling of their opposition party duties when it comes to the war in Iraq:

Many Democrats act as if that’s the end of the discussion: A mismanaged occupation has created a breeding ground for terrorists, so we should withdraw and let the Iraqis sort out the mess. Some extreme war critics are so angry at Bush they seem almost eager for America to lose, to prove a political point. Even among mainstream Democrats, the focus is “gotcha!” rather than “what next?” That is understandable, given the partisanship of Republican attacks, but it isn’t right.

I think this is an unfair portrait of the Democratic response to the increasingly well known failures coming out of Iraq. I appreciate that Mr. Ignatius is urging the opposition party to come up with the solution of which the governing party is so obviously unaware, but I think repeating the mantra that somehow war opponents are rooting for the United States to fail in order to score political points is irresponsible and disingenuous.

Iraq is a disaster. Period. Mr. Ignatius knows it. I know it. Plenty of Americans know it. The single person who has pushed hardest for us to pursue exactly the course we are pursuing is President Bush. We have one party rule in this country, and as such, nearly every wish of the president is granted. This disaster rests squarely on the president and his enablers in Congress. This much should be beyond debate.

Why is phased redeployment of American troops such a bad idea? I sense that Mr. Ignatius thinks “phased redeployment” is the calculated politically advantageous form of “cut and run”, but what is it about slowly transferring U.S. forces out of Iraq and into other theaters that are much more intimately connected to the war on terror that is uniquely bad? Why is telling the Iraqis to get their matters in order over the next twelve months, because we are going to be responding to other commitments, undesirable?

Our current engagement in Iraq is failing. Badly. We either need to send the massive number of troops over to commit to a true, unmitigated occupation of that country, or we need to position our troops in areas where they can more effectively engage in the war on terror. “Staying the course” doesn’t work. The Democrats know this. The Republicans don’t.