From the WSJ Opinion Archives

by JAMES TARANTO
Wednesday, September 27, 2006 3:37 P.M. EDT

An Intelligent Move
The Bush administration has declassified a summary (PDF) of this year's National Intelligence Estimate, after the New York Times reported on selected leaks of the NIE that made the administration look bad. The administration "had initially resisted releasing the document but changed course after being pressured to declassify the report by Republicans, including Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas, chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, and by the conservative editorial page of The Wall Street Journal," according to the liberal news pages of the New York Times.

In announcing the declassification, according to another Times report, the president implied that the leaks were politically motivated:

President Bush was clearly unhappy that findings from the National Intelligence Estimate had made their way into news reports. Noting that evidence-gathering for the assessment had been concluded in February, and that the report itself had been finished two months later, Mr. Bush said: "Here we are, coming down the homestretch of an election campaign and it's on the front page of your newspapers. Isn't that interesting?"

Here is the key passage on Iraq, which appears atop page 2 of the summary:

We assess that the Iraq jihad is shaping a new generation of terrorist leaders and operatives; perceived jihadist success there would inspire more fighters to continue the struggle elsewhere.

  • The Iraq conflict has become the "cause celebre" for jihadists, breeding a deep resentment of US involvement in the Muslim world and cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement. Should jihadists leaving Iraq perceive themselves, and be perceived, to have failed, we judge fewer fighters will be inspired to carry on the fight.

The first part of this seems to argue that the liberation of Iraq was a mistake (though the wording is ambiguous--were Saddam Hussein still in power, other factors presumably would be "shaping" new terrorist leaders). But the bullet point is a repudiation of the cut-and-run approach of John Murtha, John Kerry, Russ Feingold, et al. The Washington Post's David Ignatius makes the point:

The issue raised by the National Intelligence Estimate is much grimmer than the domestic political game. Iraq has fostered a new generation of terrorists. The question is what to do about that threat. How can America prevent Iraq from becoming a safe haven where the newly hatched terrorists will plan Sept. 11-scale attacks that could kill thousands of Americans? How do we restabilize a Middle East that today is dangerously unbalanced because of America's blunders in Iraq?

This should be the Democrats' moment, if they can translate the national anger over Iraq into a coherent strategy for that country. But with a few notable exceptions, the Democrats are mostly ducking the hard question of what to do next. They act as if all those America-hating terrorists will evaporate back into the sands of Anbar province if the United States pulls out its troops. Alas, that is not the case.

But don't be so glum, chum. The New York Sun has some good news:

On a day when much of the capital's attention was focused on leaked excerpts of an intelligence estimate report that suggested the Iraq war was creating more jihadists, the military quietly released an intercepted letter from Al Qaeda complaining that the terrorist organization was losing ground in Iraq.

The letter, found in the headquarters of Al Qaeda's leader in Iraq, Abu-Musab al-Zarqawi, after he was killed on June 7, was sent to Zarqawi by a senior Al Qaeda leader who signs his name simply "Atiyah." He complains that Al Qaeda is weak both in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region and in Iraq. . . .

"Know that we, like all the Mujahidin, are still weak," he wrote in the letter dated December 11, 2005. "We are in the stage of weakness and a state of paucity. We have not yet reached a level of stability. We have no alternative but to not squander any element of the foundations of strength, or any helper or supporter."

In fact, the NIE summary begins by noting that "United States-led counterterrorism efforts have seriously damaged the leadership of al-Qa'ida and disrupted its operations." No one said this was going to be easy, and like any important and challenging undertaking, it requires patience and forbearance.

Look Who's Talking

"[President Bush] wants voters to focus on how dangerous the world is, and not on his utter lack of ideas for what to do about it."--editorial, New York Times, Sept. 27

"Here is what we want to do in the wake of the arrests in Britain. We want to understand as much as possible about what terrorists were planning. To talk about airport security and how to make it better. To find out what worked in the British investigation and discuss how to push these efforts farther."--editorial, New York Times, Aug. 11

'My Husband Did a Great Job'
If you're nostalgic for 1998, this is a good week for you. Poor Hillary Clinton, now a U.S. senator, is defending her husband, now an ex-president, after the latter's bad behavior, namely his outburst on "Fox News Sunday." The Associated Press reports:

"I think my husband did a great job in demonstrating that Democrats are not going to take these attacks," Hillary Clinton said Tuesday. "I'm certain that if my husband and his national security team had been shown a classified report entitled 'Bin Laden Determined To Attack Inside the United States' he would have taken it more seriously than history suggests it was taken by our current president and his national security team."

First of all, did Mr. Clinton really do "a great job in demonstrating that Democrats are not going to take these attacks"? It seemed to us that he looked not tough but desperate. He was not strong and resolute; he was lashing out from a position of weakness.

Second, the 9/11 commission reported that on Dec. 4, 1998, President Clinton received a Presidential Daily Briefing titled "Bin Ladin Preparing to Hijack US Aircraft and Other Attacks."

It is unfair to condemn Clinton with 20/20 hindsight, but history is unfair. Like James Buchanan and the Civil War or Herbert Hoover and the Depression, Clinton will take the blame for inaction while a crisis mounted. True, George W. Bush didn't do much better during his first eight months in office, but he had the remainder of his terms to make up for it. As someone who is obsessed with his own legacy, Clinton knows all this deep down, which is why he snapped in that interview. In a way you have to feel sorry for the guy.

Time for a Third Party
Earlier this year the Palestinian Arabs elected Hamas to the Palestinian Authority Parliament, and Ha'aretz reports that isn't working out so well for them:

Slogans shouted at rallies sound better when they rhyme. "Not Ismail, not Haniyeh, we want back the government of haramiyeh." Haramiyeh means thieves, and the protesters in Ramallah--Palestinian Authority workers who have not received their salaries for the last seven months--shouted what can be heard in conversations in the streets of the West Bank and Gaza Strip: Hamas may be clean, but the Fatah thieves are preferable. After all, the reasoning goes, when Fatah was in power, our salaries were assured.

Seems to us the Palestinians could use a third party--one that would oppose terrorism and advocate peace with Israel, which would be the surest way of improving the Palestinian economy and even securing an independent state. Is there a Palestinian pol brave enough to stand for the interests of his people rather than hatred of the Jews?

Pope Is Catholic, Media Are Liberal
Back in June, Linda Greenhouse, Supreme Court correspondent for the New York Times, gave a politically charged speech at the Radcliffe Institute. It was standard liberal baby-boomer sanctimony, as we noted in July:

Linda Greenhouse '68 went to a Simon and Garfunkel concert soon after the war in Iraq began, and in the middle of the concert she had a crying jag. . . . "Thinking back to my college days in those troubled and tumultuous late 1960s, there were many things that divided my generation. . . . [Yet] we were absolutely united in one conviction: the belief that in future decades, if the world lasted that long, when our turn came to run the country, we wouldn't make the same mistakes. . . . I cried that night . . . out of the realization that my faith had been misplaced. . . . We were the problem."

For some reason this speech is getting attention again now, notably a segment on NPR's "All Things Considered" yesterday titled "Critics Question Reporter's Airing of Personal Views." It's what you'd expect, too, but this passage is telling:

Jack Nelson, former Washington bureau chief for The Los Angeles Times, blanches at hearing of Greenhouse's remarks, but agrees with her tough critique of the White House.

"If I was the Washington bureau chief and she was my Supreme Court reporter, I might have to answer to the editors in L.A. for that," Nelson says. "But I would do my best to support her."

Asked if he would defend Greenhouse had she said something he disagreed with, however, Nelson laughed--and said he would take issue if she had backed Bush policy.

Something odd is afoot in America's elite media--increasingly, journalists are unabashed about admitting their liberal bias. Another example is Jonathan Alter of Newsweek, who talked to radio host Hugh Hewitt yesterday:

Hewitt: What [the Washington Post's Thomas] Edsall admitted, which was so damning, is that the people who drive the news are the reporters, and the reporters are, by 15-25 to 1 leftists.

Alter: OK. All right. Now I'm not sure that ratio is wrong. I mean, I don't think anybody has a good study of it, but--

Hewitt: But it feels right.

Alter: --it's overwhelmingly, the question, though, the threshold question that you have to look at is how much does that affect their coverage? Now I think some. I think liberals who say well, that doesn't affect their coverage at all are wrong. Obviously, people's worldviews will affect their coverage to a certain extent.

We're not sure what to make of this, but it is interesting.

No Wonder Democrats Like Global Warming
"Snow to Raise Money for GOP Candidates"--headline, Associated Press, Sept. 25

Scopes Trial Revisited
"Family Sickened by Tainted Spinach Sues Natural Selection"--headline, KSBW-TV Web site (Salinas, Calif.), Sept. 26

We Hope Sen. Allen Has a Good Alibi
"Woman Finds Deer Head in Her Mailbox"--headline, WFMY-TV Web site, Jan. 6

And Some Muslims Aren't Happy
"Pope Weighing In on Shockey Talk"--headline, New York Post, Sept. 27

'Come Here Often?' and 'What's Your Sign?' Have Grown Stale
"U.S. Needs 2 New Icebreakers, Study Says"--headline, Associated Press, Sept. 26

Make Ours a 46 Regular
"House Passes Measure on Religion Suits"--headline, Washington Post, Sept. 27

The Odds of This Happening Were 200%
" 'You Only Live Twice' Actor Dead"--headline, CNN.com, Sept. 27

Life Imitates 'The Simpsons'

"I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords."--Kent Brockman, "Deep Space Homer," Feb. 24, 1994

"Hospital Trustees Send Out Feelers"--headline, Columbia (Mo.) Daily Tribune, Sept. 26, 2006

Bottom Stories of the Day

Torture Taranto?
Time magazine blogger Andrew Sullivan has an odd post, even by his standards:

A new euphemism for tying someone to a board, and dunking their [sic] head in water repreatedly [sic] so that they feel [sic] like drowning; and for keeping someone shackled in a room cooled to 50 degrees, pouring cold water over him repeatedly until he gets hypothermia, keeping him awake for 48 out of 55 days, or several of the methods used by the Soviets in the Gulag. And all these techniques used against people who haven't even been charged, let alone convicted, of any crime--just like the Soviet Union, whose buildings we coopted in Eastern Europe for our own torture. Here it is from the Wall Street Journal:

"being able to make life uncomfortable."

For the editors at the Wall Street Journal, of course, that means a delay in their car service. If it's merely uncomfortable, why don't they volunteer for it themselves. Taranto, what's stopping you?

This is the first time we can remember being the object of torture fantasies aired on a major newsmagazine's Web site. We must say, it's perversely flattering.

What of Sullivan's suggestion that we undergo uncomfortable procedures that he thinks are "torture"? We might consider submitting to "waterboarding" out of sheer journalistic curiosity. It doesn't seem as though we'd learn much from sleep deprivation or sitting in a cold room; we can easily imagine the ways in which those would be uncomfortable, and we prefer comfort. Of course, we are not a terrorist, and if we have any useful information, we put it here in this column quite voluntarily.

We did have an experience recently with a delay in our car service, and it was indeed uncomfortable. We had called a car at 8 a.m. to take us to the Fox News Channel studios for a taping of "The Journal Editorial Report," on which we were discussing Guantanamo Bay (a place that, so far as we know, Sullivan has never even visited, not that that's stopped him from opining hysterically on the subject--on both sides!).

Because of a clerical error, the dispatcher had given the driver the wrong street number. We were standing in the rain and worrying if we would make it on time, and it was very stressful. The car service succeeded in breaking us: We called them to give personal information (namely the correct street number) several times.

This was rough, but was it torture? Of course not, any more than the other techniques Sullivan so describes.

(Carol Muller helps compile Best of the Web Today. Thanks to John Williamson, Michael Segal, Ross Firestone, Ethel Fenig, Dan O'Shea, Ed Lasky, Jared Silverman, Jonathan Stephens, Jim Staley, Scott Hill, Monty Krieger, Mark Murray, Chris Nicastri, Jim Orheim, Bill Hensch, Jim Trager, Jeff Dobbs, Jim Moran, Robert Gessner, Marc Young, Mike Kumar, William McCarthy, Brendan Schulman, Dennis Powell, Daniel Foty, Bill Briggs, Daniel Freedman, Dan Schwartz, Keith Cummings and C.M. Cornell. If you have a tip, write us at opinionjournal@wsj.com, and please include the URL.)

Today on OpinionJournal:

  • Richard Miniter: What Clinton didn't do about terror, and when he didn't do it.
  • Pete du Pont: What do you know? If you're an American college student, probably not much
  • Naomi Riley: A pair of new books examine the Evangelical youth movement.

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