Here’s a good post on the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) that was just declassified.

UPDATE #2 Thursday – Washington Post sensible editorial:

A Good Estimate – washingtonpost.com

The larger thrust of the report goes well beyond Iraq or the cacophony of the midterm election campaign. It says "the most powerful weapon in the war on terror" over time will be not military success in Iraq or the capturing and killing of al-Qaeda leaders, but "the Muslim mainstream." The vast majority of Muslims are likely to reject the extreme political solutions proposed by al-Qaeda and its allies, and they will be more likely to do so if "democratic reform efforts in Muslim-majority nations progress" and entrenched problems of "corruption, injustice, and fear of Western domination" are alleviated.

The U.S. mission in Iraq since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein has been largely aimed at those goals, in one of the Muslim world’s most important countries. It should be little wonder that the effort, like U.S. promotion of democracy in Lebanon and within the Palestinian Authority, has provoked an extremist backlash. Were it to retreat altogether from the Middle East, the United States could probably reduce the number of Islamic extremist recruits in the next five years. Yet any careful reader of the intelligence estimate will find it hard to conclude that the war can be won that way.

Original post – The posting is by Ann Althouse on her (very popular) weblog. Althouse is sort of a Lieberman Democrat; very "progressive" on social issues, middle of the road on economics, strong on the war on terror.

Althouse: "It will stop all the speculation, all the politics about somebody saying something about Iraq…"

UPDATE #1: Thursday – And here’s another good post from Althouse:

Althouse: NYT thinks Bush’s release of NIE report was politically motivated.

At the end of her post she says "I’ve got to laugh. And of course I expect a torrent of comments asking me why I’m still reading the NY Times."