Avoiding the Obvious

In a maddeningly dense op-ed in the Washington Post today, Robert Kagan does his best to call into question the painfully obvious conclusions of the leaked National Intelligence Estimate on terrorism. Like many supporters of the Iraq War, Kagan simply cannot accept that the invasion of Iraq was a bad idea, that it has made us less safe. He writes:

[W]hat specifically does it mean to say that the Iraq war has worsened the "terrorism threat"? Presumably, the NIE's authors would admit that this is speculation rather than a statement of fact, since the facts suggest otherwise.

He then cites only one fact: that we haven't been attacked since 9/11. But of course the number of successful terrorist attacks on U.S. soil is hardly the only data point worth considering. Surely the NIE's assessment was based on other information, such as an estimate of the number of terrorists in the world currently seeking to harm us, both at home and abroad.

Throughout the op-ed, Kagan treats the NIE--a document that represents the consensus opinion of all of our intelligence agencies--as if it were some theory scribbled on the back of a napkin. He asks a series of progressively sillier rhetorical questions about the NIE, such as:

[A]re [the NIE's] authors simply assuming that because Muslims have been angered by the war, some percentage of them must be joining the ranks of terrorists?

Yeah, I'm sure that's the extent of their analysis. Here's another:

[A]ny 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?

Again, unless the NIE was drafted by monkeys with typewriters, I'm guessing there was some attempt made to consider basic principles of causation.

Kagan's questions get progressively weirder:

[D]id the authors of the NIE calculate the effect of the Sept. 11 attacks on the recruitment of terrorists or the effect of the bombings in Madrid and London? It is certainly possible that these events produced an increase in would-be terrorists by showing the possibility of sensational success?

I don't think that makes any sense, but, more importantly, did it ever occur to Kagan that the bombings in Madrid and London might, in themselves, be evidence of the very phenomenon described by the NIE?

Here's my favorite Kagan question:

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?

I'm going to go out on a limb and say "yes." But more importantly, why in the world does Kagan think such a calculation would cut against the NIE conclusion? While a number of foreign jihadist types did flock to Iraq after the invasion, they appear to have had little trouble recruiting local help. And whenever we kill one, five more seem to spring up to replace him. Worst of all, these terrorists are gaining invaluable training and experience in Iraq, much like the previous generation of al Qaeda did fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan. It's a mess.

Kagan then contributes this deep thought:

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.

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.

Good grief. Does Kagan really not see the glaring difference between the Iraq war and these other conflicts? Without question, those conflicts contributed to the emerging terrorist threat, but here's the point Kagan seems unable to comprehend: we fought those other wars for reasons that had nothing to do with terrorism. We had entirely different objectives we were trying to achieve.

But we invaded Iraq for the ostensible purpose of reducing the threat of terrorism. And we have achieved the exact opposite result.

Proving that he utterly fails to comprehend this basic point, Kagan ends his piece with this:

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.

Look, obviously this can't be the only consideration in determining our policy, but it should damn well be the primary one. When you are fighting a group of stateless terrorists, you can only win by reducing the total number of terrorists in the world. There's just no way around that basic equation.

It therefore makes zero sense to pursue a policy that leads to a net increase in terrorists. Is that really so hard to understand?

This is a really simple concept. The success of ideological terror groups like al Qaeda depends on two things: 1) the existence of a population of people generally supportive of the group's aims and willing to support, fund, and harbor its members, and 2) a supply of sufficiently radicalized youths from which to recruit new members. These are the basic metrics of terrorism.

The defenders of the Iraq War insist that if we hadn't invaded the country, al Qaeda would have just turned to other sources of propaganda, like our invasion of Afghanistan. But that's a weak argument. Our invasion of Afghanistan created very little backlash. Nearly everyone, including most Muslims around the world, felt that our invasion of Afghanistan was justified in light of 9/11. Could al Qaeda have used our presence in Afghanistan to recruit new members? Sure. But the effectiveness of such an appeal would be limited, particularly among Muslims in Europe and North America.

But Iraq is a whole nother story. There we invaded a Muslim country that had nothing to do with 9/11, and we did so with no provocation (at least in the eyes of most of the world). That played right into al Qaeda's hands. It greatly angered much of the Muslim world, particularly Muslims in Europe and North America, many of whom saw the war as a wholly illegitimate act of Western aggression. Our invasion of Iraq increased the two relevant metrics of terrorism. It caused al Qaeda's message to resonate more within the Muslim world, and it further radicalized the very Muslim youth most at risk of succumbing to the lure of terrorism. That's what the NIE concluded, and that's what common sense tells us.

Kagan, like President Bush himself, is so intellectually invested in the notion that invading Iraq was a grand idea, that he simply refuses to accept that it could have made us less safe.