…Not lessened it as Pres. Bush and others have been saying for the past three years!
I’ve also been saying it for years: The Iraqi war has made us less safe against terrorism and created tens of thousands of new terrorists who want nothing more than to hurt the US. According to a leaked National Intelligence Estimate, which is basically the consensus of the entire intelligence aparatus in the US, I’ve been right all along.
Expect the President to deal with the reports findings by making the issue about who leaked the report instead of the contents of the report itself.
I live in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Milwaukee, WI with my wife Jen, our daughter Emerson, and sons Carter and Colton.
I think the White House’s response was, “This is an incomplete description of the contents of the report.”
Which is great. Because it’s technically true. The report probably contains more than that assessment of the Iraq War and terror. Which would mean that a complete description should include all else.
A little bit of verbal trickery. I find it more interesting that the report wasn’t described, as far as I know yet, as “inaccurate.”
Oh wait… there goes Negroponte claiming that the terror threat has, in fact, lessened since Iraq. That Bush is a wily one – rarely does his own lying, preferring to have some replaceable underling do it for him.
I can’t wait to see the ‘unclassified version’ of this, it’s going to be even better than the ‘unclassified’ WMD reports before the Iraq war.
They basically kept all the damaging information from the report classified and unclassified anything that supported the administration line that Iraq had WMDs.
Expect the same thing here. All the damaging information will be kept classified, and anything that helps Republicans will be unclassified.
What’s amazing is the audacity of releasing an incomplete version of the document right after criticizing everyone else for drawing their conclusions from an incomplete version of it. Of course we’ll cite national security as the reason its incomplete, but this is just amazing. It’s like telling your wife that you’re against domestic violence, and then punching her in the nose to prove it.
Just got done reading the “declassified” version. Despite the sunny side they try to paint in it, if you read it you’re read with the following:
“The global jihadist movement…is spreading and adapting to counterterrorism efforts.”
“activists identifying themselves as jihadists…are increasing in both number and geographic dispersion.”
“The Iraq conflict has become the ’cause celebre’ for jihadists-”
And other similar excitements. Bottom line: we’re losing. Everything we’re doing in Iraq is making things worse.
Strangest of all, there’s no mention of the increasing Al Qaeda or Taliban threat in Afghanistan, despite the obvious fact that the country is quickly reverting to the hell-hole it was. Maybe that’s in the “non-public” version :(