The NIE, representing the consensus of 16 US intelligence agencies, prepared the report in April. As part of the leaked report was proving damning for the president he ordered some parts of the report to be declassified.

Contrary to President Bush's message, incessantly delivered to the American people, that the Iraq war was needed to save the Americans from al-Qaeda sponsored terrorism, the NIE report has dubbed the Iraq invasion as a "cause celebre" for jihadists, "breeding a deep resentment of US involvement in the Muslim world and cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement."

Despite global jihadist movement's decentralization, lack of strategic coherence, and diffusion, the NIE assesses that the jihadists, though now consisting of a small number of Muslims, are increasing both in number and geographical dispersion.

The intelligence estimate records four underlying factors fuelling the jihadist movement: (1) Entrenched grievances such as corruption, injustice, and fear of Western domination leading to anger, humiliation, and a sense of powerlessness; (2) "Iraqi" jihad; (3) Slow pace of real and sustained economic, social, and political reforms in many Muslim majority nations; and (4) Pervasive anti-US sentiment among Muslims.

This accords with historian Bernard Lewis's thesis of millennial rivalry between Islam and Christianity, and the Muslim world's significant defeats at the hands of the Christians "since the failure of the second Turkish siege of Vienna in 1683 and the rise of the European colonial empires in Asia and Africa. Islam has been on the defensive and the Christian and post-Christian civilization of Europe and her daughters have brought the whole world, including Islam, within its orbit."

Even before the events of 9/11, eruptions of Muslim discontent have been witnessed in different forms, not only vis-a-vis the Western world, seen by a section of purists among Muslims as "degenerate" and, therefore, to be abhorred and violently eliminated, but also among the Muslims themselves.

This is apart from the internecine Shia-Sunni conflict, with one group craving for modernity to bring the Islamic world into the process of globalization, while the other group asserts that too much modernity has already crept into Muslim culture and, therefore, is to be resisted at any cost.

The NIE report assesses that the jihadists regard Europe, with its extensive Muslim diaspora as an important source of recruitment and for staging terrorist attacks, as demonstrated by the Madrid and London bombings. But the jihadist appeal may not be so strong as many Muslims, particularly the women, may not like their ultra-conservative Sharia based governance.

The flagship of President Bush's war on terror, Iraq, has a constitution which has made Islam the official religion of the country and the basic source of legislation, with the proviso that no law can be enacted that contradicts the basic Islamic laws. Besides, the Iraqi constitution gives the Iraqis the freedom "in their personal status according to their religions, sects, beliefs, or choices." Some liberal Iraqis apprehend that this could very well result in an Iranian-style theocracy constricting, particularly, the rights of women, though the same constitution guarantees 25% seats in parliament to women.

If Bush fails in Iraq, he will have failed in his war on terror regardless of the fact that the US mainland may remain secure. In a recently published book, The Next Attack: The Failure of the War on Terror, authors Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon posit that unilateralism, provocative rhetoric like "axis-of-evil," overly aggressive tactics, and most of all, the invasion and occupation of Iraq, have inflamed Islamic radicalism around the world.

It is interesting, notes Princeton religious professor, Elaine Paegels, that these days the "use of Satan to represent one's enemies lends to conflict a specific kind of moral and religious interpretation in which 'we' are God's people and 'they' are God's enemies, and ours."

General Wesley Clark in his book Winning Modern Wars expressed the sentiment that by widening the war on terror the Bush administration has led the US to the path of isolation and insecurity. Contrary to the Bush administration's hope, Iraq, after the death and injury of hundreds of American soldiers and an expenditure of about $300 billion, remains far from being a democratic and stable country.

Former Defense Secretary Melvin Laird's exhortation to President Bush that the Iraq war should carry the message of American determination that the fight is about freedom and liberty has not found resonance in either Iraq or in the Muslim world.

On the contrary, people have started questioning the very thesis whether, but for the invasion of Iraq, there would have been an Islamic problem. Islamic scholars question Bernard Lewis's claim of Islam's differing "cultural values" as "expressed" through its treatment of women, stoning to death for adultery, cutting off of hands for theft, conflation of mosque and state, etc.

This thesis, they claim, fails to account for the "civilizational conflict" of Europeans killed by other Europeans (including the Holocaust) and Americans in the two great wars fought in the last century alone, and the Cold War between Christian West and atheist/Eastern Orthodox Christians of then USSR and Eastern Europe.

Professor John Mueller observes: "Although it remains heretical to say so, the evidence so far suggests that fears of the omnipresent terrorist may have been over-blown, the threat presented within the United States by al-Qaeda greatly exaggerated. The massive and expensive homeland security apparatus erected after 9/11 may be persecuting some, spying on many, inconveniencing most, and taxing all to defend the United States against an enemy that scarcely exists."

Unfortunately, the foreign policy followed by the Bush administration is not thoughtful, subtle, and sophisticated but, as Alexis de Tocqueville apprehended so many years ago, about international affairs, the Achilles' heel of American democracy.

Today, new sovereigntists believe that American interests need not be subordinated to international law, that in any case are too amorphous to merit US consent, and that multi-lateralism is not the way to safeguard American security. To be fair, one has to admit that throughout US history no American administration hesitated to adopt pre-emptive military policy when national interest was threatened. This has been the case before, during, and after the Cold War.

Besides, the US today appears to have an uncomfortable relationship with the nationalism of others, that by definition seeks maximum independence to develop, define, and pursue a state's national goals. This can happen only in a multi-polar world and not in an asymmetrical world with the US acting as the global hegemon.

As regards the NIE's key judgments, what is, perhaps, most striking is the absence of any mention of the Palestinian issue and of Israeli aggession that everyone would consider to be the casus belli of tension between the West and the Muslim world. As the declassified report contains only a part of the report, one hopes that the intelligence apparatus of the only super-power of the world would not ignore such a vital point.

Kazi Anwarul Masud is a former Secretary and Ambassador.