William Arkin has a post up this morning about the recently release and heavily debated NIE on terrorism. First he points out the NIE's theory of why terrorism exists:

(1) Entrenched grievances, such as corruption, injustice, and fear of Western domination, leading to anger, humiliation, and a sense of powerlessness;
(2) the Iraq 'jihad;'
(3) the slow pace of real and sustained economic, social, and political reforms in many Muslim majority nations; and
(4) pervasive anti-U.S. sentiment among most Muslims -- all of which jihadists exploit."

That sounds about right to me. It also sounds much like the analysis that were being bantied around years ago by thinking people before we embarked on both the Afghan and Iraq adventures. Arkin, correctly in my view, points out that three of those causes have little to do with Iraq directly. He then goes on to this thesis:

The simplistic story line that the Democrats are pushing is all about and solely about Iraq: withdraw U.S. forces, defeat the Republicans, tidy up foreign policy by giving human rights to prisoners and being nicer in the world, and voila, terror subsides.

President Bush, on the other hand, loves to insist that before we were "in" Iraq, terrorists attacked the World Trade Center and Pentagon anyhow, hence the age of mega-terror is not about the Iraq war.

"My judgment is, if we weren't in Iraq, they'd find some other excuse, because they have ambitions," Bush said yesterday. "They kill in order to achieve their objectives."

Both the Democrats and the President are wrong.

While I think Arkin's analysis is correct, I think he's being somewhat, perhaps on purpose, naive. There are really two issues regarding the GWOT. One is the actual problem of anti-Americanism resulting in terrorism. The other is selling the need for better leadership to the American voter. Republicans and Democrats are dealing with the second issue, with the GWOT being simplified into sound bites and packaged with galvanizing issues. Americans don't experience the effects of anti-Americanism by Muslims except in that American soldiers are being killed and American money is disappearing down a black hole at a prodigious rate.

Where?

Iraq.

Frankly, Americans are so short sighted that they could care less about the plight of the Muslim world .... until it spills on us. In that way, Bush's rhetoric about "bringing Democracy to the Arab world" is actually correct, although his simplistic approach to bring it in a tank isn't really working out too well.

So during the campaign, Iraq is the story. Democrats will remind the public of Iraq at every turn. Republicans will remind the public about terraaaism at every turn. But indeed as Arkin points out, Iraq and Afghanistan are merely the symptoms of the larger problem. And what's particularly frustrating is that it's likely to be a Democrat President who is left to clean up the exacerbating mess that has been left by Bush. Like it or not America, nuance is needed to deal with something as complex as the current spread of anti-Americanism. And it will likely take quite some time to clean up.

UPDATE: For those of you really interested in a takedown of the NIE, check out Juan Cole's post today.