The New York Times made much of the secret NIE report which proved, the Times assured us, that Iraq and Bush were making the terrorism problem worse. As you probably guessed even without having seen the report (which Bush has now declassified), the Times' take on the NIE report was somewhat skewed. The relevant section can be read here (It's not very long).
The Times and others in the media quoted this sentence and concluded that we need to get out of there and stop the bleeding:
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.
What they didn't tell us was the very next sentence:
Should jihadists leaving Iraq perceive themselves, and be perceived, to have failed, we judge fewer fighters will be inspired to carry on the fight."
In other words, success in Iraq is predicted to have a moderating influence on terrorist activity. The Times and its allies chose not to tell us that what the NIE report says is that what would really inspire the terrorists to redouble their barbarous efforts would be to do precisely what the Times and many Democrats have advised: Cut and Run.
Now that the relevant portions of the document have been released and reveal the Democrats' dissimulations they're calling for the entire document to be made available. They're implying that if only we saw everything in the NIE report we'd see that "Bush's War" is actually making us less safe.
This really is amusing. When the original exposè ran in the Times they only printed the single sentence above. Yet no Democrat complained that we weren't seeing the whole report. No Democrat complained that we couldn't judge the context. No Democrat demanded that the relevant portions be released so that the whole thing could be assessed. Now that they have been, and the Democrats have egg on their faces, they're insisting that we haven't seen the whole thing and that if we did we'd be convinced that they're right. Sure.
