President Bush protested last week that information from the now partly declassified National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) is being bandied about for political motives.

Well, yes. Politics being the process we use when making decisions about public policy, that’s to be expected. For the past four years, the debate about going to war in Iraq has been infused with political motives. On all sides.

On Oct. 7, 2002, as Congress was about to deliberate over a resolution giving President Bush authority to launch military action, he delivered a major address to the nation. He drove his concern home this way:

“We cannot wait for the final proof – the smoking gun – that may come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”

Those words were uttered for political effect. And they worked.

In March 2003, with his resolution approved and the invasion at hand, the president and his backers invoked comforting comparisons with the Allies’ arrival in Paris at the end of World War II.

“Like the people of France in the 1940s, they (Iraqis) view us as their hoped-for liberator,” then deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said. Those rosy words were uttered for political effect, too.

Now, after three and a half years of bloodshed and combat, after Abu Ghraib and Haditha, after millions of taxpayer dollars squandered on inept if not corrupt private contractors, after the loss of more than 2,700 U.S. military personnel and untold tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians, the hope of a quick, popular, humanitarian conquest is revealed as fallacy.

To the contrary, according to the 16 U.S. spy agencies that collaborated on the NIE, the insurgency is feeding on a diet of anti-Americanism. Continued U.S. presence has become a powerful recruiting tool for the jihadists.

Yes, the report said, U.S.-led counterterrorism efforts have taken a toll on al-Qaida. True, the problems should subside if stabler, more pluralistic Muslim governments evolve. Preventing terrorists from succeeding will undermine their recruitment efforts, the NIE noted.

At present, though, it said, the terrorist movement is growing in numbers and becoming more dispersed, drawing on thousands of Web sites for communication. The conflict in Iraq is the “cause celebre for jihadists” and increasing worldwide attacks can be expected, including on U.S. soil.

That judgment comes not from the president’s political opponents (although many of them had predicted it), but from the nation’s official intelligence experts.

And although it may embarrass an administration that’s been claiming the nation is safer, its publication by the New York Times did no harm to national security. As conservative Republican Patrick Buchanan foresaw in 2004, “We won the war in three weeks – and we may have lost the Islamic world for a generation.”

Faced with undeniable contradiction of the optimistic claims we heard four years ago from administration officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney (“they will welcome as liberators the United States”) and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld (“the people in Iraq need to know that … it will not be long before they will be liberated”), Bush angrily declassified four pages of the 30-page NIE – so people could judge for themselves.

With 26 pages still under wraps, they will be judging in the dark.