From Rand Beers and Jon Wolfsthal, people worth listening to.
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More NIE Reax
04 Dec 2007 10:24 am
Comments (6)
Careful, Matt. This is bait. The more Democrats use the report to bash the Bush administration's militancy, the worse off they will be when the Bush administration claims settlement with Iran.
Your weakness is your absolute certainty that Bush wants to solve Iran militarily, when the best political option for Bush is to merely stipulate that the Iran-nuke crisis has been solved and take credit for it. Then Bush can claim responsibility in neutralizing the nuclear ambitions of all three axis-of-evil countries.*
Just wait. You'll see.
* Note: I'm not trying to convince you of the truth of this statement. I'm trying to convince you that Democrats better be careful before they enable the political effectiveness of such a narrative.
Well, considering the gigantically horrific consequences of an American attack on Iran, I'd personally like nothing better than for Bush and Cheney to "take credit" for defusing a military confrontation and perhaps even establishing better relations.
Given all the other "problems" in the Cheney-Bush Administration, plus our looming economic collapse, such a foreign policy "triumph" would probably help prevent their poll numbers from fall much below 15% approval or whatever.
And later Bush & Cheney can tout the success as their last words to the American people just before they're publicly hanged for all their other "misdeeds."
Saddam hid the NON-existence of his wmd's because
of IRAN. It would have benefitted him vis a vis the US to transparently show he had no WMD program. The greater risk that Saddam saw was weakness in facing Iran - not the US.
Similarly, Iran stopped its nuclear program because Saddam was deposed by the US, and their primary enemy, and nearest neighbor, in the region (IRAQ, not Israel) was disarmed.
By the end of 2003 Saddam was captured and the Shiites were likely to win substantial control in Iraq.
As I've indicated elsewhere in these threads, these guys are overreacting to the NIE.
Really, nothing has changed except the concept that Iran "stopped beating his wife."
Since Iran probably never had a nuclear weapons program per se, other than possibly a military information program to learn how to build nukes (which is the job of any military in this day and age), it's disingenuous to suggest that Iran had one, then stopped it. This is just an attempt to have it both ways and claim to be correct when in reality the US intelligence agencies have been wrong all along about everything.
All evidence suggests that Iran chose its particular nuclear energy path as one that allowed for possible conversion to nuclear weapons production in the future for the same reason Japan did - potential future need. In Japan's case, China; in Iran's case, Israel and the US. This is not the same as actually having a nuclear weapons program.
More importantly, it doesn't change anything since the intent to attack Iran has never had anything to do with Iran's so-called weapons program or even Iran's "state sponsor of terrorism" nonsense. It's always been about oil, hegemony and Israel and nothing else.
So the NIE doesn't change anything except possibly make it marginally more difficult for Cheney to start the war. And Cheney has already indicated that even lacking Congressional authorization "won't stop us."
So it would be a mistake to read too much into the impact of this NIE on future events.
Excellent comments by JA, RKU, and catclub, with particular emphasis on how Bush is likely to turn this into a "place in history" opportunity, which by the next election day could play very strongly.
mds-you forgot "Beers and Wolfshal are anti-Semites."
Comments closed December 18, 2007.
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Heads in the Sand
Beers and Wolfsthal are hacks. Bitter over being shut out of administration positions because of their delusional realist approach to foreign policy, they're just commenting on this in order to promote their books. Plus the entire CIA got Saddam's WMD program wrong, so why should we believe the CIA over the White House, whose credibility is beyond question? And Valerie Plame was openly married to Joseph Wilson, so there!
Did I miss anything? Oh, right... Bill Clinton did it too! Why don't you lefties just take your "NIEs" and move to Venezuela?
Posted by mds | December 4, 2007 10:53 AM