Al Qaeda's Best Publicist

Josh Meyer, James Gerstenzang and Greg Miller write in the Los Angeles Times: "President Bush made provocative new assertions Tuesday about Al Qaeda's role in Iraq, using recently declassified information to make his case that the global battle with the terrorism network -- and Americans' safety at home -- hinges on keeping U.S. troops there to fight.

"Bush's comments were met with skepticism by some terrorism experts and former U.S. intelligence officials, who said the president exaggerated or even misrepresented the facts in Iraq. . . .

"'I think what the president is saying is in some sense fundamentally misleading,' said Robert Grenier, former head of the counter-terrorism center at the CIA as well as the agency's mission manager for the war in Iraq. 'If he means to suggest the invasion of Iraq has not created more jihadists bent on killing Americans, and that if Iraq hadn't been there as a magnet they would have been attracted somewhere else, that's completely disingenuous.'

"The war 'has convinced many Muslims that the United States is the enemy of Islam and is attacking Muslims, and they have become jihadists as a result of their experience in Iraq,' Grenier said.

"Bush also said Al Qaeda in Iraq posed a threat to Americans at home. 'We've already seen how Al Qaeda used a failed state thousands of miles from our shores to bring death and destruction to the streets of our cities, and we must not allow them to do so again,' he said.

"Several experts said prevailing U.S. intelligence was at odds with that assertion as well.

"Bruce Hoffman of Georgetown University, a veteran counter-terrorism analyst and government consultant, said the vast majority of fighters who are part of Al Qaeda in Iraq are Iraqis who have shown little interest in seeking targets beyond that country's borders."

Michael A. Fletcher writes in The Washington Post: "U.S. intelligence officials, in a declassified report on al-Qaeda released last week, described al-Qaeda in Iraq as an 'affiliate' of the larger terrorist network, which has reestablished a haven in Pakistan.

"But the report did not say that the Iraqi group had taken orders from the network; instead, it said that the larger network 'will probably seek to leverage the contacts and capabilities' of the Iraqi group and use its association with the group to 'energize the broader Sunni extremist community' for fundraising and recruiting.

"That conclusion prompted Democrats and others to say that al-Qaeda is not running the war, but is instead benefiting from it, and thus that the conflict has increased the terrorist threat rather than diminished it.

"'The masterminds who want to harm this country are in Pakistan while our troops are in Iraq. It doesn't get much simpler than that,' said Rand Beers, a former National Security Council aide who is president of the National Security Network, an advocacy group."

Fletcher also notes: "Although aides said that Bush had declassified sensitive information to make his case, most of the details he used have long been in the public domain."