Stick This In Your Stovepipe

by digby

…and smoke it.

Last week a reader sent me this and considering today’s news about Admiral Fallon, it takes on new urgency:

I just saw your post about Fallon being canned. I had a similar, sinking feeling as I was reading this William Broad piece from last Friday on how the recent Iran NIE report conclusions were a result of a “rules change” allowing the focus in the NIE to shift from uranium enrichment to weapon design.

He pointed out that the article sounded very much like it could have been written by Judy Miller and that this looked like a conscious strategy to put last December’s bombshell NIE back on the shelf. The Bush administration will not accept its conclusions, and according to the article, many of our European allies were dismayed as well.

They are apparently seeking to discredit the conclusions and the New York Times is on board, once again, with an article that makes the administration’s case better than the administration itself can. (I’m just surprised we didn’t see Cheney on the Sunday shows saying he’s “just read a report in the NY Times” that backed up the administration’s claim — which they’d fed to the NY Times.)

Anyway, the article does quote David Kay saying the administration is in disarray, but then lays out a case that pretty much says the intelligence community changed the criteria for determining the threat (from the development of fissile material to weapons design) because they were chickenshit after being wrong on Iraq.

If you read closely, you conclude that it’s just possible that they did it because they got some very reliable evidence that the Iranians had shut down its weapons development in 2003, while the evidence of fissile material was still the sort of sketchy “curveball” type stuff that led them astray on Iraq. It sounds as though the idea that everybody just *knows* that Iran is enriching uranium to build a bomb didn’t seem all that compelling to them this time so they went with what they knew, which was actually pretty convincing. Apparently the intelligence community is trying to find its way back to some semblance of rationality.

But if you read this article, that’s not what you come away witht The recent Iran NIE is based upon frightened analysts afraid of making a mistake and the Bush administration and all of our allies are very upset about it. So, they’re going to ignore it:

Mr. Bush and Mr. McConnell have both acknowledged that the December estimate damaged the effort to isolate Iran. Recently, the administration has taken steps to counter that effect.

It decided to let the atomic energy agency confront Iran with what it says is the best evidence of Iranian weapons work, some of which was revealed last Monday in Vienna. The United States had previously shown some of that evidence to selected countries, but it had declined to declassify all of the material, which was contained on a laptop apparently slipped out of Iran by a technician with access to the nuclear program. While American and energy agency officials say the documents appear real, they cannot definitively authenticate them or tie them to Iran.

If I understand the article correctly, the intelligence community has what it thinks is reliable information that weapons work ceased in 2003. But the administration and the IAEA has “other information” from some purloined laptop of unreliable provenence that indicates otherwise and that’s what they’re going with. Meanwhile, the administration is also slyly suggesting that the intelligence community “changed the rules” in midstream — and the New York Times backs it up. (Apparently it’s impossible that information from the alleged weapons program could be compelling enough to overwhelm the traditional threat matrix.) But just in case, they are now floating a bunch of hinky evidence about the weapons program too, to muddy the waters.

Does anyone feel a sense of deja vu vu?

I have often observed that one of the biggest problems with the march to war in 2002 (aside from the obvious immorality, mendacity and illegality) was the fact that the Bush administration pissed away any mystique the US ever had about it’s intelligence capabilities. One of the reasons a powerful country should never show its hand like that is that when they turn out to have been lying they have no credibility the next time. (Just like when our mommies told us not to cry wolf when we were four year olds.) It’s hard to imagine that anyone believes the administration now, but I have recently realized that a new credibility has replaced the old one — the credibility that sociopaths have when they threaten to kill you. You know they are capable of anything. This is the foreign policy of crazy that little Tommy Friedman enthusiastically recommended after 9/11 (and which Nixon and Reagan also used, to a lesser degree.) They proved they meant it with Iraq.

There is tremendous freedom of action in that sort of thing. No longer does this powerful country have to adhere to international law or worry about having to make a coherent, rational case for war. They just make assertion, ignore reality and carry on with a kabuki foreign policy that basically says, might makes right. (Otherwise known as the the “Fuck ____, we’re takin’ im out” theory.) With a compliant press and a paralyzed congress, this can work. (Unless the military starts to rebel…)

Forcing any government to make a coherent case to its citizens, its allies and the world for going to war is a requirement for any civilized society. Indeed, after WWII, there was a consensus among those left standing that made blanket prohibitions against preventive war (at least on paper, if not in reality.) But this pomo presidency has finally relegated all that 20th century nonsense into the garbage bin of history. They blatantly change the rules and openly “fix the facts”, without much pretense of adhering to previously recognized norms. In fact, that’s the whole point. As with refusing to declare waterboarding torture, they truly believe it’s useful to have the world believe the United States is run by bloodthirsty tyrants. (It’s especially effective when it actually is.)

If the Bush admnistration attacks Iran as lame ducks, based upon another laptop full of questionable secret evidence, they will have proven that the office of the president of the United States is basically a four (or eight) year dictatorship. But then, it is, isn’t it? As long as he has 34 solid Senate cronies in safe seats, he can get away with anything. If he has a 72 year old would-be successor who is unlikely to get elected, then he might as well go for those oil fields while he has the chance. With oil over a hundred dollars a barrel and rising, an economy on the brink and an approval rating in the 20s, this would be the perfect time shoot the moon and show the world exactly what the unitary American president is capable of.

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