The key judgment of the national intelligence estimate on Iraq is one that on its surface undermines the president’s new Iraq strategy. In the unclassified version of the 90-page classified assessment, it says that Iraq’s woes are overwhelmingly the fault of Iraqis. As for the sabotage of neighboring states, it says this: “Iraq’s neighbors influence, and are influenced by, events within Iraq, but the involvement of these outside actors is not likely to be a major driver of violence or the prospects for stability because of the self-sustaining character of Iraq’s internal sectarian dynamics.”

This is a carefully constructed deception. While it is true that much of the fighting men and material wreaking mayhem and confessional murder in Iraq is homegrown, it’s also true that the organizations who claim credit for this bloodshed are funded, recruited and given safe harbor at times by Iraq’s neighbors. We know this in part because of what the outgoing director of national intelligence, John Negroponte, the man who oversaw this assessment, has said. On January 30, he told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that on average, between 40 and 70 foreign fighters cross into Iraq from Syria every month.

Of Iran’s role in stoking sectarian conflict, Mr. Negroponte earlier in January told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, “One has to wonder why it is that they have increased their supply of these kinds of lethal weapons to extremist Shia groups in Iraq, provoking violence, attacks on coalition forces, and others.” Supplying lethal weapons to the Mahdi Army does sounds like it would be a “major driver of violence.” So does allowing 40 to 70 foreign fighters a month to cross into the country. On Saturday, an Iraqi government spokesman, Ali Al Dabbagh, said that half the terrorist suicide bombers targeting his country’s civilians come from Syria.

So it’s worth asking, since Mr. Negroponte in his wisdom has decided against actually sharing any specific evidence of foreign meddling in Iraq with the rest of us, why he would sign off on an estimate that appears to contradict the implications of his testimony. For this we have to assume that Mr. Negroponte was a bureaucratic loser in the Bush administration’s debate on Iraq policy. If one believes that Iraq’s neighbors are not really a major factor in Iraq’s sabotage, then it is much easier to fob this not-quite-a civil war off on these countries through a military retreat and regional negotiations.

If that sounds familiar it’s because it is the preferred policy of the Democratic Party, quite a few Republicans, and Secretary Baker. The former state secretary tried to take over war policy with his commission last November. The president rejected it, but not all of his bureaucrats agreed. We aren’t arguing that Mr. Negroponte should have “politicized intelligence,” a charge many Democrats clearly do not understand. We are arguing for the directorate of national intelligence to share more specific information about the degree of foreign meddling in Iraq. The White House decided Thursday to delay the release of such intelligence as it relates to Iran.

Do the intelligence agencies that won this debate believe, as we understand they do, that the Iranian Quds Force is not really working for the regime in Tehran and is instead a rogue security service pursuing a narrow hard-line agenda? How was this conclusion reached? Given the state of the public record, Mr. Negroponte has done a poor job in his last act as intelligence czar. Yet he has been rewarded with a nomination to be the deputy state secretary. Since 2005 Mr. Negroponte has been the adjudicator of the war policy’s facts and assessments. The senators who still want to win the war should vote against him.