Failing to Reassure

"'The president today made the best case yet for why Congress must insist on a change of strategy in Iraq,' said Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic leader. 'Intelligence analysts concluded long ago that Iraq has indeed become a training ground and recruiting poster for a new generation of terrorists.'"

Michael Abramowitz writes in The Washington Post: "Outside intelligence and terrorism experts described Bush's speech as a self-serving release of old and known information.

"'We now have several thousand al-Qaeda operatives in Iraq, and they are there because of that invasion,' said Daniel Benjamin, a Brookings Institution scholar and a Clinton White House counterterrorism official. He called the speech a 'fairly desperate effort to build some support for the mission in Iraq.'

"The U.S. intelligence community has long believed bin Laden and Zarqawi have wanted to export violence from Iraq, but after a Zarqawi-led bombing in Amman in 2005, there have been no more attacks. After the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, Zarqawi resisted direction from bin Laden and his top aide, Ayman al-Zawahiri."

Abramowitz also reports that "Bush's speech was part of a White House effort in recent weeks to portray the violence in Iraq as primarily a function of al-Qaeda, deemphasizing the internal divisions within Iraq in the apparent hope of regaining political support for an endeavor that has become deeply unpopular with the U.S. public.

"Military officials also have repeatedly attributed attacks in Iraq to al-Qaeda or aligned groups while playing down the secular fighting that was the focus of a January National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq."

Does this mean that the administration has enlisted the Pentagon in an effort to skew and spin military reports for propaganda purposes? In light of independent reports that show sectarian violence in Iraq once again on the rise (see below), that's a legitimate concern that requires investigation.

Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball write for Newsweek: "The White House dipped into an old playbook today, declassifying secret intelligence about purported Al Qaeda terror threats to the United States, in order to bolster the president's case for continued funding for the war in Iraq. But in so doing, the Bush administration exposed itself once again to charges that it exaggerates and selectively uses intelligence to score political points....

"[T]he president's characterization of the intelligence may have been incomplete -- and also ignored contradictory reporting about what actually happened, according to U.S. counterterrorism officials with knowledge of the matter."

Catherine Dodge and Roger Runningen write for Bloomberg: "Thomas Mann, a presidential scholar at the Brookings Institution in Washington, said the president is attempting to halt the erosion of public support for the war by drawing the link to the broader war against terrorism.

"'But his record of selective declassification of documents to bolster administration positions has understandably made the public deeply skeptical of such pronouncements,' Mann said in an e-mail."

Demetri Sevastopulo writes in the Financial Times: "General Joseph Hoar, the former head of US Central Command, said Mr Bush was returning to the tactic of instilling fear in the public by overstating the role of terrorists in Iraq. 'It is important to note that there was never one [an al-Qaeda element in Iraq] prior to our invasion,' said Gen Hoar....