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What’s Missing from the New NIE

By Thomas Joscelyn

The “Key Judgments” section of a new National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), titled “Prospects for Iraq’s Stability: Some Security Progress but Political Reconciliation Elusive,” was released today. I am generally skeptical about the merits of NIE’s since it is often not clear what their judgments are based on, what type of intelligence went into formulating these judgments, and what intelligence was left on the cutting room floor. And, as with the NIE on Iraq’s WMD programs in 2002, the Intelligence Community frequently errs in its assessments. Since the NIE is a consensus document, the analysis is also confined to the lowest common denominator that all agencies can agree upon, which doesn’t tell you much more than you can learn from reading open sources or making simple guesstimates. This is not to say that the NIEs are totally without merits, and occasionally they contain an interesting nugget of information. In at least two instances, the latest NIE is a good example of all the problems I described above. The following paragraph appears on the last page of the NIE:

Syria has cracked down on some Sunni extremist groups attempting to infiltrate fighters into Iraq through Syria because of threats they pose to Syrian stability, but the IC now assesses that Damascus is providing support to non-AQI [al Qaeda in Iraq] groups inside Iraq in a bid to increase Syrian influence.

Notice that the NIE limits Syria’s support to non-al Qaeda in Iraq groups inside Iraq. But, what of Syria’s support for al Qaeda in Iraq? Is this one of the groups the authors of the NIE contend that Syria has “cracked down on”? It seems unlikely, to say the least, that Syria is really inhibiting al Qaeda’s operations in any meaningful way. In fact, according to intelligence cited by Senator Joe Lieberman, Syria is doing just the opposite. From Senator Lieberman’s recent piece in the Wall Street Journal:

Recently declassified American intelligence reveals just how much al Qaeda in Iraq is dependent for its survival on the support it receives from the broader, global al Qaeda network, and how most of that support flows into Iraq through one country–Syria. Al Qaeda in Iraq is sustained by a transnational network of facilitators and human smugglers, who replenish its supply of suicide bombers–approximately 60 to 80 Islamist extremists, recruited every month from across the Middle East, North Africa and Europe, and sent to meet their al Qaeda handlers in Syria, from where they are taken to Iraq to blow themselves up to kill countless others. . . . That is why we now must focus on disrupting this flow of suicide bombers–and that means focusing on Syria, through which up to 80% of the Iraq-bound extremists transit. Indeed, even terrorists from countries that directly border Iraq travel by land via Syria to Iraq, instead of directly from their home countries, because of the permissive environment for terrorism that the Syrian government has fostered. Syria refuses to tighten its visa regime for individuals transiting its territory. Before al Qaeda’s foreign fighters can make their way across the Syrian border into Iraq, however, they must first reach Syria–and the overwhelming majority does so, according to U.S. intelligence estimates, by flying into Damascus International Airport, making the airport the central hub of al Qaeda travel in the Middle East, and the most vulnerable chokepoint in al Qaeda’s war against Iraq and the U.S. in Iraq. Syrian President Bashar al Assad cannot seriously claim that he is incapable of exercising effective control over the main airport in his capital city. Syria is a police state, with sprawling domestic intelligence and security services. The notion that al Qaeda recruits are slipping into and through the Damascus airport unbeknownst to the local Mukhabarat is totally unbelievable.

So, on the one hand we have an NIE stating that Syria still supports non-al Qaeda groups in Iraq, with no mention of the Assad regime’s complicity in al Qaeda’s terror. And on the other hand we have Senator Lieberman’s reference to “recently declassified American intelligence” indicating the precise opposite. It would be interesting to learn what intelligence Senator Lieberman is referring to and why it wasn’t included in the NIE’s Key Judgments. In the meantime, based on all of the open source reporting I’ve seen on the topic, I am inclined to believe that Senator Lieberman is right. It is hard to believe that al Qaeda terrorists are transiting through Damascus International Airport without, at the very least, the Assad regime’s approval.

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