Bush's WAR in Iraq WORSENS the TERROR threat to America. Democrats don't mind, as long as they get THEIR slice of those campaign donations....

By now, EVERYONE should know that not only was George W. Bush determined to do everything exactly THE OPPOSITE of what his predecessor, President Bill Clinton would do, but that Mr. Bush also had severe personality conflicts - contempt or scorn - with the record of his own father; former CIA director, Republican Party leader, ambassador to China, Vice President, and President George H. W. Bush.

George H.W. Bush (Sr.) was at the very heart and soul of America's two or three decade effort to maintain a BALANCE OF POWER between SUNNI Muslims and SHIA (or "Shiite") Muslims in the Mideast. After the Iranian revolution saw Shiite Ayatollahs sieze dictatorial powers in Iran, all those CBS 60 minutes scare-videos of Iraq's mighty, Soviet supplied military switched off, and suddenly the Reagan-Bush White House started SUPPLYING, SUPPORTING, and encouraging the Sunni-dominated military of Saddam's Iraq. Even though Iraq was (and is) a Shiite dominated population. Saddam's SECULAR, socialist-based regime (the Baathist Party) was able, through fear, intimidation, and propaganda, able to get Arab nationalism to trump Iraq's Shiite majority's ties to Iran's Shiite fundamentalist theocracy. Vice President George H. W. Bush was probably far more involved in this secretive, covert policy of playing Sunnis vs Shittes than President Reagan was, although President Reagan did play host to Saudi King Fahd, who, according to reports, literally had aides dump BAGS OF MONEY on President Reagan's White House desk, money intended to fund the 'anti-communist' CONTRA army in Nicaragua and Central America, armies and supplies that then violated legislation that had been signed into law to prohibit such illegal wars and proxy armies. (So much for hypocritical NYT r-w demagogue William Safire's ranting editorials about a $10,000 political donation by a China-connected company being "above the pale" of proper, moral American politics.)

DONALD RUMSFELD shaking hands with Saddam Hussein
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB82/
during Rumsfeld's "special envoy" mission to Saddam's Iraq in 1983 is only the tip of the iceberg of America' ruthless, murderous, Machiavellian double-dealings in the Mideast, for under the Bush and Reagan administrations, America would actually supply WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION TECHNOLOGY (WMD tech) to Saddam's Iraq, including NUCLEAR, BIOLOGICAL, and CHEMICAL equipment and know-how! (See "Spider's Web: The Secret History of How the White House Illegally Armed Iraq" and other sources.)
http://www.amazon.com/Spiders-Web-Alan-Friedman/dp/0553096508

To put it mildly, the ammoral post-9/11 war plans of Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, and George W. Bush UPSET THAT Balance-of-Power applecart with their grossly mis-managed invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq.. which brings us to the present, with America's troops being used as war-of-attrition canon-fodder as the embattled Sunnis in Iraq battle to keep some shred of their former rule, and as Saudi royalty quakes at the prospect of Shia unfettered domination in Iraq. (It is almost certain that the Saudis are supporting their Sunni brethren's guerrilla insurgency across the border in Iraq in a big way - Bush administration lies and propaganda to the contrary notwithstanding. Just as the Saudi-financed Al Qaida acted as ideological leaders and shock-troops for Afghanistan's Taliban rule.)

SO, WHERE are the Democrats in all this, as AMORAL Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Bush Jr. continue to push the balance-of-power rule in Iraq to "ethnic cleansing" limits that inadvertently EMPOWER America's enemy from the 1980s, the Iraq and Iranian Shiite majority?

answer- OF COURSE THE DEMOCRATS ARE AWOL, MISSING from the leadership and policy discussion forum, because the Democrats have become SO COWED by the Right-Wing smear machine (and big-media and think-tank echo chamber), and so CO-OPTED by the AIPAC neo-con agenda (if Joe Biden is the Senator from DuPont and the credit industry, and if Joe Lieberman is the Senator from the insurance lobby, then Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer, and Diane Feinstein are no doubt the Senators from AIPAC), that they PREFER SILENCE on the <> issue, to publicly rebuking the FAILURE of the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld-Rove White House to counter this growing nightmare.

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Spy Agencies Say Iraq War Worsens Terror Threat
By MARK MAZZETTI
September 24, 2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/24/world/middleeast/24terror.html


WASHINGTON, Sept. 23 — A stark assessment of terrorism trends by American intelligence agencies has found that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks.

The classified National Intelligence Estimate attributes a more direct role to the Iraq war in fueling radicalism than that presented either in recent White House documents or in a report released Wednesday by the House Intelligence Committee, according to several officials in Washington involved in preparing the assessment or who have read the final document.

The intelligence estimate, completed in April, is the first formal appraisal of global terrorism by United States intelligence agencies since the Iraq war began, and represents a consensus view of the 16 disparate spy services inside government. Titled “Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States,’’ it asserts that Islamic radicalism, rather than being in retreat, has metastasized and spread across the globe.

An opening section of the report, “Indicators of the Spread of the Global Jihadist Movement,” cites the Iraq war as a reason for the diffusion of jihad ideology.

The report “says that the Iraq war has made the overall terrorism problem worse,” said one American intelligence official.

More than a dozen United States government officials and outside experts were interviewed for this article, and all spoke only on condition of anonymity because they were discussing a classified intelligence document. The officials included employees of several government agencies, and both supporters and critics of the Bush administration. All of those interviewed had either seen the final version of the document or participated in the creation of earlier drafts. These officials discussed some of the document’s general conclusions but not details, which remain highly classified.

Officials with knowledge of the intelligence estimate said it avoided specific judgments about the likelihood that terrorists would once again strike on United States soil. The relationship between the Iraq war and terrorism, and the question of whether the United States is safer, have been subjects of persistent debate since the war began in 2003.

National Intelligence Estimates are the most authoritative documents that the intelligence community produces on a specific national security issue, and are approved by John D. Negroponte, director of national intelligence. Their conclusions are based on analysis of raw intelligence collected by all of the spy agencies.

Analysts began working on the estimate in 2004, but it was not finalized until this year. Part of the reason was that some government officials were unhappy with the structure and focus of earlier versions of the document, according to officials involved in the discussion.

Previous drafts described actions by the United States government that were determined to have stoked the jihad movement, like the indefinite detention of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay and the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal, and some policy makers argued that the intelligence estimate should be more focused on specific steps to mitigate the terror threat. It is unclear whether the final draft of the intelligence estimate criticizes individual policies of the United States, but intelligence officials involved in preparing the document said its conclusions were not softened or massaged for political purposes.

Frederick Jones, a White House spokesman, said the White House “played no role in drafting or reviewing the judgments expressed in the National Intelligence Estimate on terrorism.” The estimate’s judgments confirm some predictions of a National Intelligence Council report completed in January 2003, two months before the Iraq invasion. That report stated that the approaching war had the potential to increase support for political Islam worldwide and could increase support for some terrorist objectives.

Documents released by the White House timed to coincide with the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks emphasized the successes that the United States had made in dismantling the top tier of Al Qaeda.

“Since the Sept. 11 attacks, America and its allies are safer, but we are not yet safe,” concludes one, a report titled “9/11 Five Years Later: Success and Challenges.” “We have done much to degrade Al Qaeda and its affiliates and to undercut the perceived legitimacy of terrorism.”

That document makes only passing mention of the impact the Iraq war has had on the global jihad movement. “The ongoing fight for freedom in Iraq has been twisted by terrorist propaganda as a rallying cry,” it states.

The report mentions the possibility that Islamic militants who fought in Iraq could return to their home countries, “exacerbating domestic conflicts or fomenting radical ideologies.”

On Wednesday, the Republican-controlled House Intelligence Committee released a more ominous report about the terrorist threat. That assessment, based entirely on unclassified documents, details a growing jihad movement and says, “Al Qaeda leaders wait patiently for the right opportunity to attack.”

The new National Intelligence Estimate was overseen by David B. Low, the national intelligence officer for transnational threats, who commissioned it in 2004 after he took up his post at the National Intelligence Council. Mr. Low declined to be interviewed for this article.

The estimate concludes that the radical Islamic movement has expanded from a core of Qaeda operatives and affiliated groups to include a new class of “self-generating” cells inspired by Al Qaeda’s leadership but without any direct connection to Osama bin Laden or his top lieutenants.

It also examines how the Internet has helped spread jihadist ideology, and how cyberspace has become a haven for terrorist operatives who no longer have geographical refuges in countries like Afghanistan.

In early 2005, the National Intelligence Council released a study concluding that Iraq had become the primary training ground for the next generation of terrorists, and that veterans of the Iraq war might ultimately overtake Al Qaeda’s current leadership in the constellation of the global jihad leadership.

But the new intelligence estimate is the first report since the war began to present a comprehensive picture about the trends in global terrorism.

In recent months, some senior American intelligence officials have offered glimpses into the estimate’s conclusions in public speeches.

“New jihadist networks and cells, sometimes united by little more than their anti-Western agendas, are increasingly likely to emerge,” said Gen. Michael V. Hayden, during a speech in San Antonio in April, the month that the new estimate was completed. “If this trend continues, threats to the U.S. at home and abroad will become more diverse and that could lead to increasing attacks worldwide,” said the general, who was then Mr. Negroponte’s top deputy and is now director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

For more than two years, there has been tension between the Bush administration and American spy agencies over the violence in Iraq and the prospects for a stable democracy in the country. Some intelligence officials have said the White House has consistently presented a more optimistic picture of the situation in Iraq than justified by intelligence reports from the field.

Spy agencies usually produce several national intelligence estimates each year on a variety of subjects. The most controversial of these in recent years was an October 2002 document assessing Iraq’s illicit weapons programs. Several government investigations have discredited that report, and the intelligence community is overhauling how it analyzes data, largely as a result of those investigations.

The broad judgments of the new intelligence estimate are consistent with assessments of global terrorist threats by American allies and independent terrorism experts.

The panel investigating the London terrorist bombings of July 2005 reported in May that the leaders of Britain’s domestic and international intelligence services, MI5 and MI6, “emphasized to the committee the growing scale of the Islamist terrorist threat.”

More recently, the Council on Global Terrorism, an independent research group of respected terrorism experts, assigned a grade of “D+” to United States efforts over the past five years to combat Islamic extremism. The council concluded that “there is every sign that radicalization in the Muslim world is spreading rather than shrinking.”