Hard to disagree:
Everything this administration says on national security matters should be considered presumptively not only false, but actually the opposite of what is in fact true, until clear evidence to the contrary becomes available.
Which will be disseminated by the CIA.
A reader writes:
You asked:
"Since when did the federal Congress have the right to micro-manage what school-kids get from snack machines?"
Answer: Since childhood obesity has led to such an explosion in life-long healthcare costs which have become an enormous (no pun intended) strain on the U.S. health system, economy, and, yes, the tax-payers. As long as the American people have to pay the bills for children who aren’t provided any healthy eating options, they have a right to try to lessen the burden.
You can say that again:
How outrageous is it that the best twelve months of alarmism from Bush & Cheney have come in the context of an environment where they’ve long had access to the intelligence community’s assessment? Answer: Very outrageous.
Fred Kaplan notes, however:
President Bush and the administration’s hawkish faction, led by Vice President Dick Cheney, can take some solace from the new intelligence estimate.
For instance, the NIE states, again "with high confidence," that until the fall of 2003, the Iranians were developing nuclear weapons. It also notes that they are continuing civilian work "related to uranium conversion and enrichment." Most significant, perhaps, it concludes that the Iranians halted their weapons program "primarily in response to increasing international scrutiny and pressure resulting from exposure of Iran’s previously undeclared nuclear work."
But one implication of this last assessment is that Iran’s leaders are not so hermetic—that, as the NIE puts it, "Iran may be more vulnerable to influence on the issues than we judged previously." The Bush administration’s campaign of pressure—the smart sanctions that it imposed and rallied other nations to join—appears to have had an effect. By the same token, inducements might spur further progress.
A key recent exchange:
Q But you definitively believe Iran wants to build a nuclear weapon?
THE PRESIDENT: I think so long — until they suspend and/or make it clear that they — that their statements aren’t real, yeah, I believe they want to have the capacity, the knowledge, in order to make a nuclear weapon. […]
So I’ve told people that if you’re interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them from have the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon. I take the threat of Iran with a nuclear weapon very seriously.
They "want to have the capacity, the knowledge, in order to make." Makes more sense now, doesn’t it?
Here’s WaPo’s assessment of the NIE’s view of what caused the Iranians to go slow:
Intelligence officials credited increased international scrutiny of Iran’s nuclear program and the threat of exposure of its previously undisclosed uranium enrichment efforts with influencing Tehran’s decision to halt its nuclear weapons effort.
Senior intelligence officials said it is possible that Libya’s decision to halt its nuclear program and the war in Iraq were also factors, but said there was no direct evidence of either.
Think of this as the CIA’s professionals refighting the Iraq war against the vice-president – and winning this time.
It’s clearly the most pertinent question. It’s November 2006. You’re an administration in lots of hot water, desperate for some good news in Iraq, eager to find some shred of evidence that your foreign policy strategy isn’t a total catastrophe – and your intelligence agencies tell you that there’s no massive urgency at all, and that the Iranians suspended the worst of their program three years ago. It helps vindicate your Iraq policy, or can be spun that way. But you don’t tell anyone about it. In fact, you actively tell the American people and the world the opposite. Why?
The only conceivably credible answer to me is that Cheney simply insisted the good news wasn’t true, and blocked its publication and dissemination. And he did this while he and the president offered up the direst warnings about Iran’s nukes – World War III and the like. Was this a bluff? Or was it willful refusal to face reality … until the agencies broke through? I definitely have a sense that Gates may have been the instigator here; and what this means is that the Rice-Gates twofer has now overwhelmed the veep.
Jonah encounters the evangelical base; and it thinks like this:
Speaking for myself, there is no policy that I think a Mormon would pursue that I find objectionable. I will not vote for a Mormon because they claim to be Christian, when they are not Christians. Electing, or even nominating, a Mormon continues to send the message to Americans that Mormons are fine and dandy, Christians like everyone else.
With the usual caveat, of course:
I don’t think I’m a bigot.
Who ever does?
Gabe Schoenfeld didn’t get the Hadley memo:
In other words, the latest NIE is not a rock-solid judgment, and as we have already seen in a number of other dramatic instances, even the intelligence community’s rock-solid judgments might not be solid at all.
NPod must have had a conniption. Hard to disagree with Joe Klein:
This puts a stake in the heart of Podhoretz et al…but it also obliterates what the entire Republican presidential field has been saying about Iran for the past year. And, with Iraq quieting, it means that the election is more likely to focus on domestic concerns, which favor Democrats–that is, as long as the real Al Qaeda, the threat that Bush has been studiously ignoring, remains quiet.
One obvious implication: whatever slim chance there existed of a U.S. military intervention in Iran over the next 13 months just got way, way slimmer.
I don’t know why this fascinates me, but it does. Here’s Brendan Fraser getting hairier by the minute.
