It wasn't broke, but now we have to fix it...

A few years back, I was one of those people who left home early on a weekend morning to go spend six hours walking from lower Manhattan to midtown to protest the US invasion of Iraq. I believed then that the President was not representing how I, as New Yorker whose offices are no more than a mile from Ground Zero, wanted our nation to respond to the attacks of September 11th. Afghanistan and the bin-Laden hiding, opium profiteering Taliban? Yes. No-fly-zone enclosed Iraq and the embargoed Hussein? No. So, it comes as no surprise to me then that the joint report issued by 16 of our nations convert agencies has identified the war in Iraq as being a leading contributer to the spread of terrorism and jihadism around the globe. As the times article Spy Agencies Say Iraq War Worsens Terror Threat states:

The intelligence estimate, completed in April, is the first formal appraisal of global terrorism by United States intelligence agencies since the Iraq war began, and represents a consensus view of the 16 disparate spy services inside government. Titled “Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States,’’ it asserts that Islamic radicalism, rather than being in retreat, has metastasized and spread across the globe.

An opening section of the report, “Indicators of the Spread of the Global Jihadist Movement,” cites the Iraq war as a reason for the diffusion of jihad ideology.

The report “says that the Iraq war has made the overall terrorism problem worse,” said one American intelligence official.

There's not much else to say on the subject. In two years, when this administration is finally out of office, our nation will have a lot of work to do to recover from these mistakes.

Oh yes, before anyone who disagrees with my view of the Iraq war responds with declarations that this is partisan information leaked to the press to make the administration look bad, let me add one more quotation from the times:

National Intelligence Estimates are the most authoritative documents that the intelligence community produces on a specific national security issue, and are approved by John D. Negroponte, director of national intelligence. Their conclusions are based on analysis of raw intelligence collected by all of the spy agencies.