Category: The Dish

An update on National Review’s in-house fabulist scandal.

He didn’t get the Hadley memo:

The Iran NIE for beginners:  As though MI6 told Stanley Baldwin in 1933 that fears that Hitler would reoccupy the Ruhr in 1934 were groundless.

It’s always Hitler, isn’t it?

Michael Guest was an openly gay ambassador to Romania for the Bush administration, and his appointment was seen as a sign that the Bushies would not let the anti-gay base determine hiring decisions. Guest is now leaving the State Department:

“Most departing ambassadors use these events to talk about their successes . . . But I want to talk about my signal failure, the failure that in fact is causing me to leave the career that I love,” said Mr. Guest, 50, whose most recent assignment was dean of the leadership and management school at the Foreign Service Institute, the government’s school for diplomats.

“For the past three years, I’ve urged the Secretary and her senior management team to redress policies that discriminate against gay and lesbian employees. Absolutely nothing has resulted from this. And so I’ve felt compelled to choose between obligations to my partner — who is my family — and service to my country. That anyone should have to make that choice is a stain on the Secretary’s leadership and a shame for this institution and our country,” he said.

As gay people adjust to a stronger, deeper sense of their own equality, the formal discrimination against them supported by the GOP will rankle more and more. Losing the votes and support of gay people and their families may not torpedo the current Republican party. But it weakens it.

Commentary goes after, ahem, Ehud Olmert.

Some Republicans, deciding on the issue of character and integrity, as well as revulsion at the recent evolution of the GOP, have come to see the choice as McCain or Paul. I’m not a Republican, but in thinking through the GOP candidates, I’m down to those two as well. Brad Porter wrestles with the issue here. His conclusion:

Would Ron Paul make the best President? How likely is he to ever actually be a factor? I don’t know. I don’t care.

I do know that I have very little voice left in this party. I have no more worries about electability or partisan concerns, not with how much ideology has already been thrown under the bus for those ends, to the point where what’s left is hardly recognizable. So when I speak, I want to make sure that I’m voting for a real change, that I’m voting to register in a clear voice my disgust and my desire for a new, old direction. To that end, though I like John McCain a lot, I’ll vote for Ron Paul. And my conscience, believe you me, will be totally clean.

The fundamentalist psyche strikes again:

"To me, the NIE (National Intelligence Estimate) provides an opportunity for us to rally the international community—to continue to rally the community—to pressure the Iranian regime to suspend its program," the president said. "What’s to say they couldn’t start another covert nuclear weapons program."

He also asserted that the report means "nothing’s changed," focusing on the previous existence of a weapons program and not addressing the discrepancy between his rhetoric and the disclosure that weapons program has been frozen for four years.

"I still feel strongly that Iran is a danger," he said. "I think the NIE makes it clear that Iran needs to be taken seriously as a threat to peace. My opinion hasn’t changed."

No question Iran is still a danger. But you have here a classic example of Bush’s foreign policy thinking: his position is that Iran is a threat and must be countered by all necessary means. This applies whether Iran is cooperating or not cooperating. It applies if Iran is accelerating work toward a nuke or if it has suspended its work. Like other idees fixes, i.e. tax cuts, the data are less important than the assertion of doctrine. The empirical reality doesn’t matter when dealing with the regime like Tehran. Bush believes that it’s the nature of that regime to be a source of destruction. And so policy will always be the same.

The empirical question is simply whether Iran can be appealed to and dealt with as a rational actor on the world stage rather than as an existential enemy. I don’t think this is an easy call, and my suspicion of some neocon statements about Iran doesn’t mean they don’t have a critical point about a country headed by a religious fanatic like Ahmadinejad. But as a prudential matter, the news that the Iranians may well have responded rationally to international threats by suspending their program in 2003 suggests to me that they are open to sticks and carrots; and that diplomacy with them requires more nuance. This can therefore be seen as an opportunity for more engagement, not less.

That is the difference between conservatism and neoconservatism; the former is empirically based, skeptical and flexible. The latter is ideological, faith-based and rigid. With Gates and Rice ascendant, conservatism may be having a come-back.

Sucker-punched, he careens forward:

I entertain an even darker suspicion. It is that the intelligence community, which has for some years now been leaking material calculated to undermine George W. Bush, is doing it again. This time the purpose is to head off the possibility that the President may order air strikes on the Iranian nuclear installations. As the intelligence community must know, if he were to do so, it would be as a last resort, only after it had become undeniable that neither negotiations nor sanctions could prevent Iran from getting the bomb, and only after being convinced that it was very close to succeeding. How better, then, to stop Bush in his tracks than by telling him and the world that such pressures have already been effective and that keeping them up could well bring about “a halt to Iran’s entire nuclear weapons program”—especially if the negotiations and sanctions were combined with a goodly dose of appeasement or, in the NIE’s own euphemistic formulation, “with opportunities for Iran to achieve its security, prestige, and goals for regional influence in other ways.”

A RedStater comes out for McCain.

An unimpressive performance. The key point seems to be that new evidence emerged just in the past two weeks that made it possible to reassess Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Is this true? Scott Horton:

One highly reliable intelligence community source I consulted immediately after Hadley spoke answered my question this way: “This is absolutely absurd. The NIE has been in substantially the form in which it was finally submitted for more than six months. The White House, and particularly Vice President Cheney, used every trick in the book to stop it from being finalized and issued. There was no last minute breakthrough that cause the issuance of the assessment.” So what, I asked, caused the last-minute change and the sudden issuance of the summary of the NIE? My source had no idea.

He speculated, however, that a hardening of attitudes within the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the intelligence community, and in Israel against the air war in Iran had caused Cheney and his team to fold their cards. “But I’d leave that with a final note of caution,” the source added, “Cheney sometimes appears to give up, but he’s a tenacious son-of-a-bitch. He may very well be back at it tomorrow.”

My hunch is that this is the final collapse of the neocon wing of the Bush administration. They simply couldn’t survive Iraq.

The campaign insists they’re back on track. Dave Weigel pours on the cold water here.