WASHINGTON – Democrats on Sunday seized on an intelligence assessment that said the Iraq war has increased the terrorist threat, saying it was further evidence that Americans should choose new leadership in the November elections.

The Democrats hoped the report would undermine the GOP’s image as the party more capable of handing terrorism as the campaign enters its final six-week stretch.

Their criticisms came in a collection of statements sent to reporters Sunday amid the disclosure of a National Intelligence Estimate that concluded the war has helped create a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks.

The report, completed in April, represented a consensus view of the 16 disparate spy services inside government, according to an intelligence official. The official, confirming accounts first published in Sunday’s New York Times and Washington Post, spoke on condition of anonymity on Sunday because the report is classified.

“Unfortunately, this report is just confirmation that the Bush administration’s stay-the-course approach to the Iraq war has not just made the war more difficult and more deadly for our troops, but has also made the war on terror more dangerous for every American,” said Rep. Rahm Emanuel, head of the Democratic effort to take control of the House.

“It’s time for a new direction in this country,” Emanuel, D-Ill., said in the statement.

“Press reports say our nation’s intelligence services have confirmed that President Bush’s repeated missteps in Iraq and his stubborn refusal to change course have made America less safe,” said Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid. “No election-year White House PR campaign can hide this truth.”

A White House spokesman, Blair Jones, said, “We don’t comment on classified documents.” But he said the published accounts’ “characterization of the NIE is not representative of the complete document.”

In a statement issued Sunday, Bush’s national intelligence director, John Negroponte, said, “What we have said, time and again, is that while there is much that remains to be done in the war on terror, we have achieved some notable successes against the global jihadist threat.”

He added, “The conclusions of the intelligence community are designed to be comprehensive and viewing them through the narrow prism of a fraction of judgments distorts the broad framework they create.”

The White House issued a written rebuttal that argued administration officials have been making some of the same arguments as in the intelligence estimate. A White House strategy booklet released this month described the terrorists as less centralized and still a threat to the United States. Bush himself said on Sept. 5 that “terrorist danger remains” and the broader terrorist movement is becoming more dispersed and self-directed.