That's politics.
The scary part is that the president seems to think the three-page sliver released Tuesday concludes that the United States is winning its global war on terror.
The official summary does no such thing. If anything, it echoes the weekend news leaks with the conclusion that the American invasion of Iraq has actually strengthened the worldwide jihadist movement.
The disconnect leads one to wonder if Bush has even read the document, or if he just hopes that, having heard the White House's spin, nobody else will read it, either.
If anything, we should be reading the entire NIE. It should be declassified immediately so that we can determine for ourselves if our government's actions are making the world a safer, or a more dangerous, place.
The part of the official summary that the administration wants us to read is as important as the rest but, if it's possible, even more depressing. It's the part that concludes that a U.S. abandonment of Iraq would be seen by the jihadists as a huge victory, one that would embolden them and swell their ranks.
Of course, the original invasion, and its calamitous aftermath, also emboldened them and swelled their ranks.
What to do?
First, read the report. See that the terrorist threat is not an army that can be crushed, Death Star-like, in a military victory. It is a state of mind created by oppression, corruption and poverty in the Muslim world and intensified by a fear of Western domination.
The intelligence estimate intelligently notes that the vast majority of the world's Muslims do not want to live in a world dominated by an extreme fundamentalist clique of their own faith. But any motivation the moderate majority might have for taking a risky stand against the jihadists is undercut by a widespread fear of living in a U.S.-dominated global empire.
That fear is so large that a recent poll finds that 60 percent of Iraqis support extremist attacks on U.S.-led forces in Iraq.
The NIE - at least the parts of it we've been fed so far - does not map an easy way out of this global mess. But it does make it clear that the road we're on is the wrong one.
The entire NIE should be declassified immediately.
