As Congressional Democrats, and some Republicans, push to condemn the president’s new Iraq strategy, the release last week of a new National Intelligence Estimate was said to “strengthen their hand.” The reports conclusions, mainly that the violence in Iraq is “self-sustaining,” and that the involvement of Iran and Syria was “not likely to be a major driver of violence or the prospects for stability,” were said to buoy Democratic arguments for a diplomatic and political approach to both the insurgency and the nascent civil war. Said Senator Rockefeller, the new chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, “The steps identified by the intelligence community as having the best chance of reversing the chaos and bloodshed in Iraq are all political developments, not military.” Of course, a political solution would require the United States to engage Iran, Syria, and Moqtada al-Sadr in some type of dialogue, despite the fact that the report also stated that some 70 fighters were crossing into Iraq from Syria every month and that Iran was providing “lethal support” for groups such as Sadr’s Mahdi army. Would such a dialogue also extend to Al Qaeda in Iraq? It might have to. Of the 16 intelligence agencies that contribute to the National Intelligence Estimate, four dissented from the report’s conclusion that the Sunni insurgency was mainly comprised of former Baathists. Eli Lake, writing in the New York Sun, reports today on the existence of an official dissent by “Treasury Department’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, and the military intelligence bureaus of the Army and Marines.” Those agencies have concluded that “the Baathist wing of the umbrella Sunni terrorist group has ceded authority to Abu Ayoub al-Masri, the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq who replaced Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.” Lake says the majority view gives cover to those who would say that Iraq is not a central front in the war on terror. But what if the dissenters, including the Marines who surely have the most intimate knowledge of the situation in Anbar, are right? Then any negotiations would require engaging with al Qaeda, and any retreat would leave al Qaeda in Iraq free to its own devices in much of the country.
