Bush NIE Declassification Responds to Kagan Article?

Robert Kagan has the breadth and depth of a real old-fashioned intellectual, an intelligent man with a broad perspective on the past, present and future. I look forward to reading Dangerous Nation, his upcoming book about US foreign policy. He unmasks the NIE selective leaks that propose that the Iraq War has somehow increased the number of terrorists, although the number of signature overseas terrorist hits has diminished.

In his declassifying the NIE memo, Bush may have already responded to Kagan's piece in the WaPo which condemns selective leaking by the Bush-bashing duo, the WaPo and the NYT:

As a poor substitute for actual figures, The Post notes that, according to the NIE, members of terrorist cells post messages on their Web sites depicting the Iraq war as "a Western attempt to conquer Islam." No doubt they do. But to move from that observation to the conclusion that the Iraq war has increased the terrorist threat requires answering a few additional questions: How many new terrorists are there? How many of the new terrorists became terrorists because they read the messages on the Web sites? And of those, how many were motivated by the Iraq war as opposed to, say, the war in Afghanistan, or the Danish cartoons, or the Israel-Palestine conflict, or their dislike for the Saudi royal family or Hosni Mubarak, or, more recently, the comments of the pope? Perhaps our intelligence agencies have discovered a way to examine, measure and then rank the motives that drive people to become terrorists, though I tend to doubt it. But any serious and useful assessment of the effect of the Iraq war would, at a minimum, try to isolate the effect of the war from everything else that is and has been going on to stir Muslim anger. Did the NIE attempt to make that calculation?

Obviously, there are no methodologies to quantify such strange vectors in the graphing of terrorism recruiting motives. Kagan keeps making sense:

Finally, a serious evaluation of the effect of the Iraq war would have to address the Bush administration's argument that it is better to fight terrorist recruits in Iraq than in the United States. This may or may not be true, although again the administration would seem to have the stronger claim at the moment. But a serious study would have to measure the numbers of terrorists engaged in Iraq, and the numbers who may have been killed in Iraq, against any increase in the numbers of active terrorists outside Iraq as a result of the war. Did the NIE make such a calculation?

The fact that there has been no great instance of a terrorist attack since 9/11 and that a recent airborne attempt from the UK [complete with martyrdom tapes and corroborative evidence] was thwarted by intercepts and by a Pakistani who fessed up under duress appears to prove, if a negative can be proved, that no terror equals successful anti-terrorism.

There is, in addition to all this, a question of context. What should we do if we believe certain actions might inspire some people to become potential terrorists? Should we always refrain from taking those actions, or are there cases in which we may want to act anyway? We have pretty good reason to believe, for instance, that the Persian Gulf War in 1991, and the continuing presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia after the war, was a big factor in the evolution of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda. We are pretty sure that American support of the Afghan mujaheddin against the Soviet occupation forces in the late 1970s and early '80s also contributed to the growth of Islamic terrorism.

This is the sort of thinking which makes foreign policy development headache-inducing. Even if one is "successful," one can be accused of making a mistake. Kagan knows this and continues to ask unanswerable questions:

Knowing this, would we now say that we made a mistake in each of those cases? Would an NIE argue that we would be safer today if we had not helped drive the Soviets from Afghanistan or Saddam Hussein from Kuwait? The argument in both cases would be at least as sound as the argument about the most recent Iraq war.

The ceaseless self-mutilation of the left is not only the onset of an "Age of A Scary Us," [h/t: Mark Steyn], but the sort of feminized, girlie-man foreign policy first initiated by the feckless incompetent Jimmy Carter which seeks approbation from abroad and smug self-righteousness among its proponents.

This tranquilized passivity will lead to more 9/11s than an alternate path stressing a muscular foreign policy which respects the rights of other nations. Of course, like the MSM proposing the Carter-coma above, I can't prove my suggestion will be "successful." However, the US must enforce international law unilaterally if the UN is too politically flummoxed to carry out Security Council resolutions. America must not be a giant Gulliver tied down by hundreds of puny Lilliputians. America must assert itself.

The alternative is to once again become a hyper-lawyered over-firewalled Clinton/Berger/Albright trio of monkeys hearing, seeing and speaking no discouraging words. Could get someone upset and move the polls!

Foreign Policy is not a popularity contest, Clinton and Carter to the contrary notwithstanding. Kagan ends his article with the ultimate standard: safety.

In fact, the question of what actions make us safer cannot be answered simply by counting the number of new terrorist recruits those actions may inspire, even if we could make such a count with any confidence. I would worry about an American foreign policy driven only by fear of how our actions might inspire anger, radicalism and violence in others. As in the past, that should be only one calculation in our judgment of what does and does not make us, and the world, safer.

No more Iraqs, but there are other ways to enforce UN resolutions that the GA and Security Council want to walk away from.