The Other 90% - An Instahoglets Special On The NIE

Now that Bush has refused to release the 90% of the NIE that would have damaged his case - that "staying the course" has made the world and the U.S. safer - even more than the Key Findings he thought he could get away with, many are left wondering just exactly what was in that other 90%. I've a few suggestions. Pick one, some, all or suggest your own.

It may have echoed a British Ministry of Defence paper (quickly spun by the Blairites ahead of Musharaff's visit) that says Pakistan's ISI is backing the Taliban and Al-Qaida and should be dismantled. That would be a huge embarassment to Bush who has wholeheartedly supported his "ally" while Musharaff plays the West for all he can get. The paper also echoes the NIE in saying that "the war in Iraq has acted as a recruiting sergeant for extremists from across the Muslim world" and claimed that a secret deal to extricate UK troops from Iraq so they could focus on Afghanistan failed when British military leaders were overruled.

Or it may have agreed with a UN report that says "New explosive devices are now used in Afghanistan within a month of their first appearing in Iraq," said the report. "And while the Taliban have not been found fighting outside Afghanistan/Pakistan, there have been reports of them training in both Iraq and Somalia." Such a level of decentralized cooperation between cells across thousands of miles would argue against Bush's claim to have broken the back of Al Qaida and the Taliban. The UN report also says that Al-Qaida "has gained by continuing to play a central role in the fighting (in Iraq) and in encouraging the growth of sectarian violence, and Iraq has provided many recruits and an excellent training ground," Anyone getting a sense of a theme here?

Or the problem might have been mentions of a State Dept. poll showing overwhelming Iraqi support for a U.S. withdrawal (71% over the whole country) coupled with an Iraqi belief that the U.S. will never leave unless forced to (77 percent of those polled said the United States intends keep permanent military bases in the country). That, at the end of the day, is the motivating force behind the ongoing insurgency.

Even Iraqi MPs are furious at their President for suggesting the U.S. keep bases in his native Kurdish region - which was probably a ploy on his part to ensure he had American troops around as a hedge against Iran and Turkey as well as his other Iraqi cohabitants.

The other Iraqi ethnic groups are finding their own hedges - private militias which everyone talks about disbanding and nobody does - and the sectarian feuding looks to me to be mostly motivated by preemptive self-preservation by all sides against the day the U.S. does leave. A balance of power, 'militia MAD', is probably now that nation's best hope for staying together. If one side gets too strong, then they will have every reason to try to sweep the board.

Maybe the reason lies in that cryptic last "Key Finding", the one about “leftist” groups which use the Internet as a serious terrorist threat. Certainly, there's no mention of right-wing, anti-government movements such as the guys who made the Texas cyanide bombs or perpetrated the Oklahoma bombing. Maybe there are plans to carry through on uber-right accusations of lefty "traitors" and put all those handy Halliburton-built concentration camps to good use.

Or it could be that the entire African front in "the longish war on some terror" was a sham, a fake, a useful fiction. Some claim that the entire story of the fight against Al-Qaida linked groups in the Sahara was made up out of whole cloth by Algeria - including evil mastermind, great battles and a massive manhunt across several countries - so that they could convince BushCo to sell them some cool new weapons. The Bush administration, those same analysts say, then went along with the fiction because it looked good for their political spin machine. If the NIE were to admit that, even tacitly, it would be more than a teeny-tiny bit of a vote loser, wouldn't it?

Or it might just be that the full NIE included assessments of where "staying the course" might lead next. Suppose those secret pages said something like this:

US forces are now surrounded by a sea of militias and insurgents. Within Baghdad itself, where the current pacification effort is focused, US troops are badly outnumbered in extremely difficult urban terrain. Worse yet, the opposition is growing in numbers, sophistication, and aggressiveness at a rate more rapid than the static number of US troops can build up the Iraqi military. It is now only a matter of time before either a misstep or a calculated event pushes the countryside into full scale warfare.

In this near term conflict, we are likely to see a repeat of the lightly manned defensive hedgehog used successfully by Hezbollah against Israel. That lesson was not lost on this war's open source participants, particularly Sadr's Mahdi Army, which uses Hezbollah as a model (which implies they might try to replicate Hezbollah by translating success on the battlefield into the critical currency of "legitimacy"). If placed along critical US military supply routes or immediately outside US mega-bases, and augmented by informational superiority (a combination of better local intelligence and advanced signals intercepts), these defensive tactics would extract a heavy toll on US troops (even as the US wins a tactical victory). Further, if repeatably successful, these efforts will force the US to forgo all efforts at offensive pacification operations in favor of basic force protection (not only for US troops, but the tens of thousands of civilians on these bases). From that point on, the timer will be on until a US forward base is overrun (when it finally goes off, we will be cooked).

Or it might just be a revelation that the current administration has decided to leave the whole sorry mess for the next incumbent of the White House to solve.

Oh yes, there are many reasons that the NIE will stay classified, none of them good for the nation or, more importantly, GOP poll numbers.