NIE And More

Hamid Karzai and President Bush speaking in a very frank manner to the press- definitely a video to watch. Bush should be this forthright more often.

Here are a couple of samples from the transcript here.

BUSH: I'm not surprised the enemy is exploiting the situation in Iraq and using it as a propaganda tool to try to recruit more people to their murderous ways.

Some people have, you know, guessed what's in the report and have concluded that going into Iraq was a mistake. I strongly disagree. I think it's naive. I think it's a mistake for people to believe that going on the offense against people that want to do harm to the American people makes us less safe.

The terrorists fight us in Iraq for a reason; they want to try to stop a young democracy from developing, just like they're trying to fight this young democracy in Afghanistan.

And they use it as a recruitment tool because they understand the stakes. They understand what will happen to them when we defeat them in Iraq.

This statement is particularly telling- My judgment is, if we weren't in Iraq, they'd find some other excuse, because they have ambitions. They kill in order to achieve their objectives.

And

KARZAI: We are a witness in Afghanistan as to what they are and how they can hurt. You are a witness in New York.

Do you forget people jumping off the 80th floor or 70th floor when the planes hit them? Can you imagine what it will be for a man or a woman to jump off that high?

Who did that? And where are they now? And how do we fight them, how do we get rid of them, other than going after them? Should we wait for them to come and kill us again?

As HotAir notes, it's the way that Karzai delivers this which has the most impact-

It’s not so much what he says as how he says it: the long pauses, the look of utter incredulity that an educated person — from New York City, no less — might not still appreciate the stakes five years later.

I've just watched a clip on the BBC lunchtime news about the NIE leak and subsequent declassification and they completely misrepresented it. They went to pains to spell out this- 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.

And then left out the 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.

So much for unbiased reporting.