That is the essential point being made in this New York Times piece about a bit of intelligence we have to depend on them to interpret. Not that I am skeptical of their interpretation or anything after all they have gotten so much right in the past . But isn’t it at least passingly strange that the observation that fighting back makes more terrorists has been one of the Anti War Left’s main talking points since about 5 minutes after the North Tower collapsed. (Due no doubt to the explosives the Bush administration had planted according to a much larger portion of that same Anti War Left group than anyone feels comfortable admitting to.)
Spy Agencies Say Iraq War Worsens Terror Threat - New York Times WASHINGTON, Sept. 23 — A stark assessment of terrorism trends by American intelligence agencies has found that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks. The classified National Intelligence Estimate attributes a more direct role to the Iraq war in fueling radicalism than that presented either in recent White House documents or in a report released Wednesday by the House Intelligence Committee, according to several officials in Washington involved in preparing the assessment or who have read the final document.
Indeed we have a mini scandal involving a Arizona Memorial to 9/11 that says: “You don’t win battles of terrorism with more battles.”. Wow, how is that for a consistent message? I suppose that the idea is attractive to anyone intent on not fighting. It springs from that same self preservation impluse that saw the Mainstream media not publish the Mohammed cartoons, that impluse being coarsely characterized as the fear of being blown up. Bravery is not real high up on the list of attributes evident in a lot of the United States opinion centers. What may be a bit more frightening and worth looking into is how much of the rot of cowardice has infiltrated itself into the leaders of our bureaucracies.
One of the more popular sentiments expressed after 9/11 was that it changed everything and that we couldn’t look backwards. Futhermore it was unhelpful to blame anyone for the failures that led to the worst terrorist attacks in history. That no one could see it coming and firing anyone responsible for the failures would hurt the morale of the different agencies into which trillions of our dollars had poured in large part to avoid such attacks. So absolutely no one got fired and we ended up giving the Freedom Medal to the exact person who should have been first on the list to be fired, George Tenet.
Which is a long way of saying that if our intelligence agencies truly believe this Anti War tripe then our failure to hold them to account is now more than ever a big problem. Because if they are truly coming out with nonsense like this then the attitude inside of those agencies is still mired in 9/10 thinking.
Tags: 2008 , BlogDesk , Cheney , Clinton , Hamas , Hesballah , Hezballah , Hezbollah , Iran , Iraq , Islam , Israel , Khomeni , Loose Change , McCain , Muslim , Pajama Media , President Bush , Saddam , Sam Harris , suitcase nukes , Syria , terrorism , terrorist , Washington Post , WMD
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