1 Boring Old Man

By any criteria, the N.I.E. is troubling. Several things strike me about it.

First, this Report cannot assess where we would be if we hadn’t invaded Iraq – if we’d stuck to the real task, and only gone to war with the Terrorists themselves [e.g. al Qaeda]. I feel confident that this report would read a lot differently. While I think that the jihadists are deluded fanatics, I doubt they would be able to recruit so many followers had we stuck to fighting the actual enemy instead of going to war with the whole Middle East by invading Iraq. There’s no way for the Arab Moslems not to think that we are at war with them as a group, rather than at war with a specific subset that attacked us repeatedly.

Second, this Report brings no clarity to the question of how much of the violence in Iraq is a Civil War between the Sunni and Shi’a sects of Islam, and how much of it is a war of the jihadists against us. That is a monumentally important question that, unless I’m misreading it, the Report fails to address.

Finally, there is nothing in the Report that is remotely good news. We’ve been staying the course for over three years, We’ve spent billions of dollars. There are fifty thousand dead human beings. And there’s not anything in that Report that suggests we’ve gotten anywhere by invading Iraq. The Report cannot asses where we’d be if we had used all of the energy we’ve put into Iraq in other, more perspicacious endeavors.

I read this Report as utterly damning. If there are any conclusions to be reached from it, they are that the Iraq misadventure is a failure, has intensified our danger, and has now become an insoluable addition to the problem we already had.