Bush’s troubles grow

You know that the president and his closest advisers are in a lot of trouble when the “intelligence” agencies of his government will no longer provide the backup he needs to sell his foreign policy to the people.

That’s what is happening right now between Bush and all the secret police agencies of the U.S. government, from the CIA on down.

The National Intelligence Estimate, a classified document, was recently leaked to the press. The New York Times and the Washington Post broke the news about it on Sept. 24. The document had been kept under wraps since its finalization in April and 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,” according to the Times.

Director of National Intelligence John D. Negroponte had to approve it. His hard-line background, especially his role in the Contra war against Nicaragua and his stint as U.S. ambassador to Iraq, make its conclusions all the more remarkable.

In brief, the document’s judgment is that the Iraq war, instead of making the U.S. safer, has made it more likely to experience a terrorist attack. “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,” was the way the Times summarized it.

Anyone with a clear sense of what is going on already knew that the horrible war crimes committed by the Pentagon in Iraq had made the Bush regime hated all over the world. But no one in the U.S. government would say that openly. Even this document, of course, does not refer to the invasion and occupation as war crimes.

Nevertheless, the damage was done. Bush’s main theme, repeated endlessly since before the war began, has been that he was acting to protect this country from terrorism. He, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice have all tried to justify the war by linking Iraq somehow to al-Qaeda and 9/11—a link that never existed.

Because of this kind of hard sell of the war, many young people joined the Army, Marines or National Guard, thinking they were helping to protect their families and communities. But as the fighting and occupation have ground on, enlistments have gone down and skepticism about the aims of the war has risen in the general population.

At the same time, it has become very clear to many in the capitalist establishment, but outside of Bush’s narrow circle, that the war is making things worse for U.S. imperialism in the world. It is not terrorism they fear the most, but popular resistance by oppressed peoples—and it is growing throughout the Middle East and elsewhere.

The release of this document just weeks before the midterm elections is yet another symptom of the bitter struggle going on within the capitalist state itself. It forced Bush to selectively release part of the document for public scrutiny—but only so he could put his own spin on it and claim that it supports his policies.

No one should think that the government’s spy agencies have suddenly become dovish. The CIA is still the CIA. They all just want to promote the Empire more effectively and see Bush and his group as incompetent CEOs who either have to change their ways or step aside so the company can become more profitable.