Politicized U.S. intelligence reports aren’t exactly a rarity. The actual intelligence assessments are usually carefully worded, but the moment they are brought into the political theater—either by leaks or testimony—all nuance is deliberately obliterated, often by the officials presenting the information.
The most infamous example of this was the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate on Iran’s nuclear program. Officials played up the claim that the NIE found Iran had stopped advancing toward a nuclear bomb. A footnote in the report made clear this was false—and then a couple years later the intelligence community retracted the report. The false headline claim was simply the result of bureaucrats trying to influence U.S. policy by manipulating the information.
Now we have administration figures attempting to spin a new intelligence report because an honest reading of the information is inconvenient for the White House. At a hearing on global threats, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines said the following about Israel’s war against Hamas: “The crisis has galvanized violence by a range of actors around the world. And while it is too early to tell, it is likely that the Gaza conflict will have a generational impact on terrorism.” Further, the Washington Post reports, Haines said that “Iranian-backed militant groups have used ‘the conflict as an opportunity to pursue their own agenda’ against the United States. ‘And we have seen how it is inspiring individuals to conduct acts of antisemitism and Islamophobic terror worldwide.’”
Readers know that “anti-Semitism and Islamophobia” is a giant red flag telling you that what you are hearing is politico-speak intended to muddy the picture without it necessarily being a lie. And indeed, you can see how the framing of this, in the context of the Biden administration’s efforts to strike a ceasefire, matters a great deal. According to the intelligence report from which Haines was working: “The Gaza conflict is posing a challenge to many key Arab partners, who face public sentiment against Israel and the United States for the death and destruction in Gaza, but also see the United States as the power broker best positioned to deter further aggression and end the conflict before it spreads deeper into the region.”
America can only reduce the threat by capitulating to Hamas and Iran, according to this reading of the report. There are two major problems with this. The first is that it’s hogwash, and the authors of the report know it’s hogwash.
As terror experts pointed out in the immediate aftermath of Hamas’s Oct. 7 slaughter, the attacks themselves were a catalyzing force for global terrorism, much more so than was Israel’s dismantling of Hamas in response. In October, I quoted Lynn O’Donnell on the “broader impact of the Hamas attacks,” which was, she said, “the possibility that terrorist groups around the world will try to match the spectacular carnage that Hamas pulled off earlier this month, which had a death toll equivalent to multiple Sept. 11 attacks on a per capita basis in a small country such as Israel.”
This is because it’s the successful attacks, not the failures, that garner funding for terrorist groups. Hamas has had fairly steady financial patrons because it is somewhat fixed territorially and serves a very specific purpose that is tied to Israel. But the global terror groups that could represent a threat to America are in competition for resources that Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks will free up for groups other than Hamas. The Hamas attacks serve as model and inspiration for copycats and their moneymen.
Which means the most dangerous option is to allow Hamas to get out with anything it can reasonably claim as a victory. Hamas’s defeat will benefit America’s security; its survival will put more targets on Western backs.
The other problem is that administration officials know this—the Post says the report itself acknowledges the public-relations coup that Oct. 7 was for Hamas. The administration feels the need to spin how the report is sold to the press and the public because the truth contradicts the president’s political interest in uniting his party in an election year. To do that, he wants (though he doesn’t need) to bring back into the fold enough dissenters on his Gaza policy to take the air out of the pro-Hamas faction of his progressive base.
This is becoming a pattern. In a stunning moment in the president’s MSNBC interview over the weekend, Biden admitted that “Hamas would like a total ceasefire across the board, because then they see they have a better chance to survive and maybe rebuild.” The president sputtered immediately after saying that and fumbled out four separate segues as if he were a skipping record: “But that’s not what—I think the majority of people think—you have to—look—.” Then he went silent to collect his thoughts and get back on track. He wasn’t supposed to make the argument against a permanent ceasefire precisely because that argument is unassailable. He can’t pretend to want to give in to his left flank if he’s also going around explaining why their demands are so ludicrous and contrary to U.S. interests.
But he’s going to have to explain this, eventually. And when he does, he cannot pretend he misspoke. The fact of the matter is Biden and the intelligence community know what’s best for America and are choosing to dissemble at a time when U.S. leadership is called for. This will continue to backfire until someone is willing to be honest with the anti-Israel caucus in the party and align American policy and the president’s rhetoric with what Biden knows to be true: Israel must win this war.
