The NIE
Posted by Joseph Knippenberg
I’m late to this game, but I can’ resist calling your attention to John Bolton’s analysis of its substance and Robert Kagan’s suggestions about the only remaining alternatives for President Bush.
9:19 AM / December 6, 2007
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Justin,
Boy, if you like this particular post, you should have been around when Bush was spouting the same lies about Iraq! Those were the good old days.
Back then, about half the country, and about 98% of the readers and writers on this blog gobbled up Bush's lies without even chewing. Once in a while, a troll or a leftie communist America-hating, traitorous, liberal terrorphile would criticize Bush and his evidence lacunae, but Gosh! how the pack would circle and snipe and attack! It was a spectacle to behold!
Today, well, we get you, Justin, and the crickets.
You shoulda been here back then.
Bolton is happy to label the current NIE on Iran as political, but is he - or anyone else on the right-fringe with him - willing to admit that the intel on Iraq was "sexed up" for political (and ultimately deadly) purposes, as the Downing St. Memo has shown? If, and it's a big if, the US intel community is now pushing a more conservative (!) stance on Iran, perhaps some within it are doing so as a kind of revenge for being misrepresented and humiliated by Colin Powell and the Bush White House, with the worthless Curveball info, the cartoons displayed at the UN, and the uranium from Niger nonsense.
Or maybe their "political" revenge is simply telling it like it is this time and not playing along in another effort to sucker the American people into another elective war. If being wrong about Iraq was the result we got from US Intel last time, perhaps being political, and getting it right about Iran, is exactly what is needed right now. (So no, you can't trot out the tired line of "fake but accurate" here. It WAS fake AND inaccurate with Iraq. Today, with Iran, I suspect it is realistic and accurate, even if it does displease Bush, Cheney & Co.)
And if I've gotta choose between Bolton, PNAC co-founder Kagan (his jaw must be sore from so much chomping at the bit & braying for more war), some right-wing bloggers and the US Intel Community, at this juncture I think it would be prudent to take the Intel Community at their word. Iran's nuclear weapons program has been halted, and we can't even be sure they're seeking to restart it.