in the lap of the gods… revisited
by Shane Nicholson
Published: January 14, 2008
Smattered across headlines of the entire blogosphere today is the apparent revelation that President Bush does not agree with the findings of the National Intelligence Estimate of Iran’s nuclear program released in December.
Apparently transcripts of Bush’s two announcements in the days following the release of the NIE weren’t available for review this morning.
“Iran was dangerous, Iran is dangerous and Iran will be dangerous if they have the know-how to make a nuclear weapon,” the president said to a collection of reporters less than 24 hours after the NIE hit the headlines.
He called the estimate “an opportunity for us to rally the international community” to pressure Iran into suspending its efforts to enrich uranium. Bush claims that in spite of the intelligence community’s conclusions, Iran is still a danger and that the report was merely a “warning sign” not to be ignored.
Not to be outdone (by himself), Bush followed up on the Wednesday after the release with this gem: “They can come clean with the international community about the scope of their nuclear activities and fully accept the longstanding offer to suspend their enrichment program and come to the table and negotiate.”
Did we have a new smoking gun camouflaged by a scorching report by the collective intelligence agencies pointing us in other direction?
Shrill voices of neo-cons certainly thought so, and they took to the airwaves in full force to tell anyone who would listen that the report simply could not be trusted. John Bolton jumped at an opportunity to appear on FOX News and take a swing at the intelligence community as a whole: “I raise this as a question, whether people in the intelligence community who had their own agenda on Iran for some time now have politicized this intelligence and politicized these judgments in a way contrary to where the administration was going.”
The problem for the administration, of course, wasn’t that the intelligence community had an “agenda” against the administration. Rather, it was that the intelligence community didn’t roll over and play dead like they did in the lead up to Iraq. This time, they weren’t laying out a path to war with bright flashing neon lights adorning the road to Tehran. Instead of handing CheneyCo. the smoking gun everyone at 1600 PA Ave. wanted, they turned over a water pistol that didn’t really fire all that straight and, well, couldn’t even really hit anything more than a few feet away.
Russia and China both called the administration’s bluff stating that new evidence would have to be collected before they would consider any new sanctions against Iran. This leaves us to believe that these two totalitarian states have more respect for our intelligence community than our own executive branch. (Or, in the Vice President’s case, the Super Duper Top Secret Not Part of the Actual Government Even Though You Had To Elect Me To Office Branch.)
A couple of days later, being confronted with the fact that the NIE’s report was in the same basic form about six months prior, but its release was blocked by veep’s war hawks, the administration toned down its rhetoric, backed off the report and went back to pointing out that DC was now full of them liberals who want to take away your SUVs.
Of course, Congress was more than happy to oblige, just as they have every time a chance to take the administration to task over the past year has come up: But I understand, thirty-percent approval ratings for the man I was elected to fight would scare me off, too.
So the hawks bided their time and we were allowed to forget about the scathing findings of the Iran NIE, just long enough to get through the holidays and have more pressing things to worry about, like why those jeans you just bought in October don’t fit anymore.
The Bush team knew as well as anyone going into this Middle Eastern tour that any major item the president and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert discussed would find its way to the press.
The problem was that, instead of details of a potential peace agreement between the Israelis and Palestinians making the news, the press repeated Bush’s rehashed mistrust of the organizations this country relies upon for its entire intelligence operations. Though that story hasn’t been “news” since the day after the NIE came out-it is finally hitting RSS feeds across the web.
Don’t worry though; more distractions will come soon enough.
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