All I Know Is That I Don't Know Nothing

Via Paul Waldman, Eric Black notes that the shift in Bush's rhetoric from warning about Iranian nuclear weapons to warning about Iranian nuclear knowledge happened back in August, suggesting that this is around the time at which the White House became aware of the Intelligence Community's view that Iran had no active nuclear weapons program.

That's plausible, though one can also imagine a more multifaceted process. Under this theory, Bush would have been informed of IC views some time before August, at which point they just got ignored. Then there may have been some moment when Mike McConnell or someone else important within the intelligence world got upset and said "you can't have people saying blah blah blah" and thus begins the era of what Black calls "Clintonian parsing," language designed to obscure the new facts while technically staying within the bounds of what the new information says. But eventually even this got to be too much and pressure was obviously brought to bear from inside the executive branch to release the NIE to the public, thus depriving the parsing strategy of much of its utility.

Comments

Is this the third Operation Ivy reference in the past month?

Posted by Anonymous | December 10, 2007 10:43 AM

Damnit, anonymous, I was totally going to call that out. You beat me to it!

Posted by alli | December 10, 2007 10:55 AM

Apropos of the primary season:

We get told to decide. Just like, as if we're not gonna change our minds.

Posted by Jer | December 10, 2007 12:18 PM

This completely ignores the fact that the Bush Administration and the Israelis both have been saying for the last couple years that Iran having the capacity to enrich was a total red line and totally unacceptable.

Well, they weren't just talking about physical centrifuges - they were talking about the technological capacity, which obviously includes knowledge.

How the blogosphere got on this nonsense about Bush complaining about Iranian "knowledge" as if it means anything different than what Bush has been saying all along is beyond me.

Talk about "Clintonian parsing".

Get a clue, Matt. It's utterly irrelevant whether Bush is parsing his words differently, or when he supposedly learned about "new intelligence" - which is likely complete bullshit since the NIE has been in its present form for the past year, according to intelligence analysts who had seen it.

You're still buying the notion that this NIE is some sort of "push back" against Bush getting the country into another war. It is NOT. It is yet another STEP in getting this country into another war. It's a disinformation document masterful in its ambiguity.

How the hell can Bush "suddenly" become aware that the IC knows there is no Iranian nuke program when a) he and Cheney never cared anyway because the supposed program was merely an excuse from day one for a pre-designated policy from back before Bush was even elected in 2000, and 2) the IAEA has already demonstrated that there IS NO Iranian WMD program (despite being hesitant to declare about Iranian "intentions)?

You people just can't reason at all, can you?

Oh, well, you'll find out in due time when the war starts. But then, you'll hie off on some other pointless track.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | December 10, 2007 7:45 PM