It’s not until the fourth paragraph that the Washington Post story on the leaked but now declassified (pdf) terrorism National Intelligence Estimate gets to the second line of the NIE’s two-line assessment of the Iraq War:
Should jihadists leaving Iraq perceive themselves, and be perceived, to have failed, we judge fewer fighters will be inspired to carry on the fight.
There you have it. If anything, the NIE bolsters President Bush’s foreign policy objectives. It recognizes that Iraq has become a “cause celebre among jihadists” contrary to the original hope of most supporters, but the question for the last three years has not been about how we got there, but what we do next and the NIE makes clear that victory is the only answer — not re-deployment or Iraqization, victory.
The rest of the key judgements agree that “real and sustained economic, social, and political reforms in many Muslim majority nations” will help to quell terrorist recruitment, but anti-American sentiment runs deep. That is why Hugo Chavez cites Noam Chomsky. But, as the bluster over the NIE itself demonstrates, exposure is the Achilles heel of this anti-Americanism.
