Damned if you do, damned if you don't...

I've been casually following this recent story about the leaked National Intelligence Estimate report finding that the war in Iraq has actually increased the overall terrorist threat in the United States. I'll admit that I was duped into believing the faulty intelligence about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. I figured, if someone with as much integrity as Colin Powell would put his neck out there for this, surely it must be true. Even prominent Congressmen on the other side of the aisle like John Kerry and Hillary Clinton, both of whom you would have suspected would have had insider access to this intelligence and could have interpreted whether they were credible or not, apparently believed Iraq was a threat, too, and gave the President the authority to wage war.

At the start of this conflict, I thought this could be a good idea. Position the United States smack in the middle of the cinderbox that is the Middle East, and take down fundamentalists like our positioning in western Europe took down the Soviet Union and communism. And although it sounds extremely bad to say that we went to war for oil, I'd argue that protecting our oil interests in the region is very important to our national security and economy, having much more impact on our lives than merely padding the pockets of the petroleum industry. I'm still under the belief that no matter how far-fetched the neoconservative ideas of pacifying the Middle East were, the right intentions were there, albeit the right plan might not have been.

Alas, the intelligence was false, the weapons weren't there, and we're left with a situation where we're damned if we pull out and damned if we stay. The Dems seem to be grabbing onto this new intelligence report and turning the tables on the Republicans. And, of course, the White House is firing back today (from the New York Times):

Mr. Bush said today that he agreed with the intelligence report’s findings that "because of our successes against the leaders of Al Qaeda, the enemy is becoming more diffuse and independent." He said he was not surprised that enemies of the United States would use the conflict in Iraq to attract recruits to join in "their murderous ways."

Which leads me to wonder, who's right? If you believe the White House, much of the leaked material from the NIE report was taken out of context, and after it's declassified, the report taken as a whole will paint a much different picture. I could interpret Bush's comments to mean that although the war in Iraq has created a recruitment tool for terrorism, the terrorists being recruited are not very organized and, thus, are less of a threat to pull of something as grand and intricately planned as September 11th. Of course, that also seems to make us vulnerable to a more invisible threat or some isolated lunatic with an army of suicide bombers at his disposal.

I don't know where I'm going with this. Hopefully, I didn't offend anyone--this was a bit unfiltered. I'm just vomiting out what's in my head, and interested to see what you guys have to say, as this is what I kind of intended this forum would be for. Perhaps if we had real leaders in government, I wouldn't feel compelled to think about this stuff.