The big news on the defense and foreign policy front is the release earlier today of the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq, an unclassified summary of which is now available online (.pdf). Congressional staff are poring over a much longer (90-page), classified version. President Bush was presented with a copy of the full report yesterday.
National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley discussed the NIE with reporters, characterizing the report as “a good statement about the risks if we do not succeed in Iraq, for Iraqis, for the region, and for Americans here at home.” (Count this as Exhibit A for the defense.)
Bloggers immediately pounced on the report to make the counterpoint, namely that the Bush administration’s escalation plan — by the NIE’s own admission — couldn’t possibly work (Exhibit B for the prosecution).
The near-instantaneous interpretation of a key intelligence assessment is hardly a new phenomenon. As I explain in my book John F. Kennedy and the Missile Gap, the selective leaking and politically motivated interpretation of intelligence muddied the water on the nature of the Soviet threat in the late 1950s. (A more digestible paper I wrote for the Princeton Project on National Security that discusses these 1950s-era debates, as well as a discussion of the “Team B” controversy of the 1970s, can be found here.)
The response to the latest Iraq NIE fits a similar pattern. Each side is fixing on a few relevant passages to prove its case or, failing that, to engender doubt about the other side’s arguments.