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That is the official judgement of our entire national intelligence community.

WASHINGTON, Sept. 23 — 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.

The classified National Intelligence Estimate attributes a more direct role to the Iraq war in fueling radicalism than that presented either in recent White House documents or in a report released Wednesday by the House Intelligence Committee, according to several officials in Washington involved in preparing the assessment or who have read the final document.

The intelligence estimate, completed in April, 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. Titled “Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States,’’ it asserts that Islamic radicalism, rather than being in retreat, has metastasized and spread across the globe.

An opening section of the report, “Indicators of the Spread of the Global Jihadist Movement,” cites the Iraq war as a reason for the diffusion of jihad ideology.

The report “says that the Iraq war has made the overall terrorism problem worse,” said one American intelligence official[..]

National Intelligence Estimates are the most authoritative documents that the intelligence community produces on a specific national security issue, and are approved by John D. Negroponte, director of national intelligence. Their conclusions are based on analysis of raw intelligence collected by all of the spy agencies.

Analysts began working on the estimate in 2004, but it was not finalized until this year. Part of the reason was that some government officials were unhappy with the structure and focus of earlier versions of the document, according to officials involved in the discussion.

Previous drafts described actions by the United States government that were determined to have stoked the jihad movement, like the indefinite detention of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay and the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal, and some policy makers argued that the intelligence estimate should be more focused on specific steps to mitigate the terror threat. It is unclear whether the final draft of the intelligence estimate criticizes individual policies of the United States, but intelligence officials involved in preparing the document said that its conclusions were not softened or massaged for political purposes.

Frederick Jones, a White House spokesman, said that the White House “played no role in drafting or reviewing the judgments expressed in the National Intelligence Estimate on terrorism.” The estimate’s judgments confirm some predictions of a National Intelligence Council report completed in January 2003, two months before the Iraq invasion. That report stated that the approaching war had the potential to increase support for political Islam worldwide and could increase support for some terrorist objectives.

Got that? They knew going in this might present problems for us, and yet they chose to fight this war in a half-assed way. And yet somehow they've also managed to simultaneously convince people that they have made the nation "safer." Brilliant.

UPDATE: Ezra nails it:

The NIE represents the consensus view of 16 spy agencies "are the most authoritative documents that the intelligence community produces on a specific national security issue." Essentially, there's no more forceful or respectable analysis the US government could generate on the topic. And it has concluded that Iraq has made terrorism in America more, not less, likely.

Said another way, Bush's reaction to 9/11 was to embark on an unrelated war that significantly increased the chances of 9/11. Were the Republican Party a more serious, rather than forthrightly ideological and partisan institution, this would radically upend their support and faith in the mission. Instead, the Bush administration sought to suppress this report, even going so far as to demand it be restructured towards providing solutions for calming the terrorist threat rather than actually explaining what we have done to intensify it. And you can see why. If this document was honestly absorbed -- it is, again, the best product our intelligence community can muster -- this would be the end of the Republican majority in 2006, and Bush's effective authority on terrorism for the remainder of his presidency. It will not be taken so seriously, and that is our loss. The magnitude of the fuck-up we've suspected and it alleges is magnificent, and it's no exaggeration to say it puts the lie to the entirety of the Bush presidency.