The New York Times reports today that an assessment produced jointly by all US intelligence agencies says US actions in Iraq exacerbated terrorism.

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.

The National Intelligence Estimate is a consensus report, mind you, which means the conclusions represent what everyone felt comfortable signing off on. The Times says that “[p]revious 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. ”

Without knowing the identities of the policy makers in question, the sentiment sounds as though it comes from someone who would rather not dwell on previous missteps or, for that matter, on lessons imprinted (or more likely not) by fallout from past policies. The White House says that’s not anyone in their neck of the woods: “Frederick Jones, a White House spokesman, said the White House “ ‘played no role in drafting or reviewing the judgments expressed in the National Intelligence Estimate on terrorism.’ ” One can be forgiven a degree of skepticism.

The findings in the report won’t come as a surprise to anyone enjoying more than a nodding acquaintance with reality. As we’ve noted before, the CIA said more than a year ago that Iraq was providing invaluable urban warfare training for imported extremists who might return to their home countries and put that training to use. It might not even come as a surprise to many administration officials.

For one of them, at least, it might address a concern he put to his staff back in an October, 2003, memo.

Today, we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror. Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?

Well, Mr. Rumsfeld, now we know. Perhaps the new NIE accounts for his outburst against Bush yesterday.

Rumsfeld’s memo was the subject of an early BTC News post which included a memorable quote unearthed by Eleanor Clift:

It’s hard to believe that Rumsfeld would go to these lengths to strike a bureaucratic blow at the White House. “He laid a giant turd on the front doorstep of all the happy talk,” says a Senate Republican aide. If Rumsfeld didn’t intend for this memo to get out, then it was a “revenge of the toes,” the aide speculates. “He stepped on so many toes that this was somebody’s way of getting back at him.”

Well toes and turds or no, we got us some metrics now. We’ll see whether anyone can put them to good use, either politically or practically.

UPDATE: The Washington Post adds a bit more detail on the NIE contents and a somewhat more blunt comment from one source: ” ‘It’s a very candid assessment,’ one intelligence official said yesterday of the estimate, the first formal examination of global terrorist trends written by the National Intelligence Council since the March 2003 invasion. ‘It’s stating the obvious.’ “

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