Showing Some Class

Something incredible is about to happen, and I'm a little bit anxious. The President has ordered Negroponte to declassify the National Intelligence Estimate. This will be, by all means, the ultimate scorecard of what has transpired in the past year. As I mentioned before regarding the leak, it's impossible to quantify how much is good and how much is bad:

The summary of the NIE story is not surprising: the Iraq war is the primary recruiting place for terrorists (OG Jihadis? or wannabees?), but it's not adequately quantified for a reasonable judgement to be made. It has become clear to me, reading Fiasco, that th Iraqi Insurgency was just that despite Administration claims to the contrary - that they were primarily foreign fighters. So the way I see it it's good and bad news but hard to tell what the mix is.

For example, I just listened to the podcast of Hugh Hewitt's interview with the author of the best book out on Al Qaeda - The Looming Tower. He says that 80% of the original AQ fighters were captured or killed in Afghanistan. So the top leadership of the Wahabist campaign was decapitated except for Bin Laden and Zawahiri. Furthermore Zarqawi, who was no Atta, but still the head of AQ in Iraq is dead and his number two has already been captured as well as more intel. So on the one hand this proves that Iraq is a distraction from getting rid of AQ, which was pretty much a fait accomplit before 2003, not counting Zarqawi et al.

So if you take that angle, it suggests that Iraq wasn't key. But then if you take the new NIE seriously, then it confirms the Bush / neocon idea of 'taking the war to the terrorists' and that the foreign fighters want to engage American troops in the Middle East.

What needs to be clarified from my perspective is whether or not the new disconnected Website Jihadis are any more capable than the Seas of David. The NIE is saying that they are not directly connected to AQ. So how seriously should they be taken? If the FBI is capable of handling the amateur cells, then they are.

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I would prefer a president and a political citizenry who takes all such acts seriously as part of a formal or informally defined Jihadi enemy. You can't know their terrorist provenance if you treat them just like normal criminals because the criminal act is already done and all a criminal court cares about is crime scene evidence. I say interrogate them as potential combattants and prove they are or are not connected, and do so in special counter terrorist courts, following Posner's lead.

But there is no question that this declassification signals a new level of transparency. I am not believing for a moment that there is no political machination in this. It's so patently obvious that the Right is suspect of the NYT motivations in securing the leak of this document to make the assertion that Iraq is making the world worse. Any good news in the NIE is not going to be presented without spin, but given the antipathy of the Left with Bush, there's no way the conversation would get past the same old catfight when the 'Truth' is classified. So declassification paves the way for Bush to show the good news.

But it also undermines his arguments that leaks help the enemy. I believe that the NIE is a different sort of document than the operations of the SWIFT program, for example, but it still does give some high level understanding of where we are in the GWOT. I have to say that's a general plus, and it has been my gut since 9/11 that the general citizenry would be best served with some tactical information about how to handle terrorism. I'm recalling the document passed around the net about what to fear and what not to fear about anthrax.

In November of 2001, all of us found 'anthrax' somewhere, and we tested the ability of our phone systems and police departments to respond to our concerns. They couldn't of course. Our new diligence overwhelmed authorities, and it always will. In these situations, there are winning and losing leaders. The winning leaders, like Rudy Giuliani are the ones who respond by the reassurance of directing our concern into actions we can take. The losing leaders like John Ashcroft are the ones who respond by promising to lead a regime of change so we don't have to do anything. In other words those who promise to take care of us fail. Those who show us how to take care of ourselves win.

So what the President can do is guide a new level of Saturated Awareness. Since the millions of us have decided, at one level or another, to second guess an Executive Branch suffering a crisis of credibility with at least half of the nation, it's time he turned on the firehose and let us really deal.