NY Times did not challenge Bush claim that terrorists "would attack us at home" if U.S. withdraws from Iraq

Summary: An article in The New York Times reported President Bush's assertion that withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq would "embolden our enemies and make it more likely that they would attack us at home," without noting expert opinion that a U.S. troop withdrawal is unlikely to result in a terrorist attack on the United States.

In a September 4 article inThe New York Times, David S. Cloud and Steven Lee Myers reported President Bush's assertion that withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq would "embolden our enemies and make it more likely that they would attack us at home" -- without mentioning the numerous security and terrorism experts who have challenged this claim. Further, the article ignored a recent survey finding that only 12 percent of experts believe that the United States would be attacked by terrorists as a direct result of a U.S. troop withdrawal from Iraq. Moreover, some foreign policy experts have said that it is the U.S. occupation of Iraq that increases the likelihood of a terrorist attack on the United States. An April 30 report on National Public Radio's All Things Considered quoted retired Brig. Gen. John H. Johns saying, "It's actually leaving American forces in Iraq ... that increases the chances of a terrorist attack on the U.S."

As Media Matters for America previously noted, media outlets routinely fail to mention challenges to the Bush administration's oft-repeated assertion that a U.S. troop withdrawal from Iraq would result in a terrorist attack on the United States. In the third issue of the Terrorism Index, a nonpartisan survey of foreign policy experts conducted by the Center for American Progress and Foreign Policy magazine, released in August, only 12 percent of the experts polled said they believed that a U.S. troop withdrawal from Iraq was either very or somewhat likely to directly result in a terrorist attack on U.S. soil. The findings in the August survey are consistent with analysts' claims that a U.S. withdrawal is unlikely to result in attacks on the United States.

For example, according to an April 6 McClatchy Newspapers article, "[m]ilitary and diplomatic analysts" say that a similar claim by Bush -- that "this is a war in which, if we were to leave before the job is done, the enemy would follow us here" -- "exaggerat[es] the threat that enemy forces in Iraq pose to the U.S. mainland." The article continued: "U.S. military, intelligence and diplomatic experts in Bush's own government say the violence in Iraq is primarily a struggle for power between Shiite and Sunni Muslim Iraqis seeking to dominate their society, not a crusade by radical Sunni jihadists bent on carrying the battle to the United States." The article quoted a U.S. intelligence official as saying that "[t]he war in Iraq isn't preventing terrorist attacks on America" and noted that "the likelihood that enemy combatants from Iraq might follow departing U.S. forces back to the United States is remote at best."

Moreover, as Media Matters has also noted, The Washington Post reported in a March 18 article that "U.S. intelligence officials and outside experts" have said that Al Qaeda in Iraq "poses little danger to the security of the U.S. homeland."

From the September 4 New York Times article:

"After talks with Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top American commander in Iraq, and Ryan C. Crocker, the ambassador to Iraq, Mr. Bush said that they "tell me that if the kind of success we are now seeing here continues it will be possible to maintain the same level of security with fewer American forces."

Mr. Bush did not say how large a troop withdrawal was possible. Nor did he say whether he envisioned any forces being withdrawn sooner than next spring, when the first of the additional 30,000 troops Mr. Bush sent to Iraq this year are scheduled to come home anyway.

Still, his remarks were the clearest indication yet that a reduction would begin sometime in the months ahead, answering the growing opposition in Washington to an unpopular war while at the same time trying to argue that any change in strategy was not a failure.

"Those decisions will be based on a calm assessment by our military commanders on the conditions on the ground -- not a nervous reaction by Washington politicians to poll results in the media," Mr. Bush told a gathering of American troops, who responded with a rousing cheer. "In other words, when we begin to draw down troops from Iraq, it will be from a position of strength and success, not from a position of fear and failure. To do otherwise would embolden our enemies and make it more likely that they would attack us at home."

—S.N.J.