The release yesterday of the conclusion of the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran answered one big question: Iran does not have an active nuclear weapons program, which Tehran shut down more than four years ago. It’s a debate-changing revelation that fundamentally alters how national security and foreign policy professionals perceive events in the Middle East.
Having said that, the blockbuster disclosure raises some new questions that need answers. For example, why has the White House been saber-rattling, making claims about Iran that aren’t true?
President Bush got the world’s attention this fall when he warned that a nuclear-armed Iran might lead to World War III. But his stark warning came at least a month or two after he had first been told about fresh indications that Iran had actually halted its nuclear weapons program.
TP assembled some startling examples of “faulty, inflammatory rhetoric” from the Bush gang, which the White House press corps obviously remembers. It led to some interesting exchanges between reporters and National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley yesterday afternoon.
Q: Is it fair to say that the intelligence came in, in recent weeks, not recent months? Because this — as was pointed out, the press briefing was late October when the President was asked definitively, do you believe Iran wants to build a nuclear bomb? And that’s where you get, in the second part of that answer, the World War III comment.
HADLEY: Correct.
Q: So was it recent weeks that this intelligence came in?
HADLEY: What the intelligence community has said is in the last few months.
Of course, that makes matters worse, at least as far as White House credibility is concerned.
Put it this way: what does “months” mean? As recently as October, the President personally made multiple references to “World War III” with Iran; the Vice President insisted publicly that the U.S. “cannot stand by as a terror-supporting state fulfills its grandest ambitions”; and the president’s chief spokesperson said, matter-of-factly, that “Iran has not stepped back from trying to pursue a nuclear weapon.”
If that’s what the White House had to say in October, when did the Bush gang learn that they were wrong? Hadley told the press corps yesterday he wasn’t sure, exactly: “As I say, it was, in my recollection, is in the last few months.” Pressed for specifics, the NSA suggested it may have been “August, September.”
That wouldn’t help the White House’s case — the Bush gang may be confused, but “August, September” comes before October.
OK, but if these guys had an NIE that told them the truth, and they went out and said the opposite anyway, why release the NIE’s conclusions at all? Why advertise the fact that they were lying? And why make the disclosure this week, undermining the administration’s efforts to secure new sanctions against Iran? At this point, no one seems to know for sure — Kevin Drum suggests congressional pressure forced the White House’s hand, though Spencer Ackerman argues that’s not the case.
As for the big picture, Josh Marshall raises an important point.
[I]t shows us once again, for anyone who needed showing, that 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. They’re big liars. And actually being serious about the country’s security means doing everything possible to limit the amount of damage they can do over the next fourteen months while they still control the US military and the rest of the nation’s foreign policy apparatus.
Truer words were never spoken. We’re well past the point of giving the president the benefit of the doubt, or assuming that he has any credibility left on matters of national security or foreign policy. This is a White House that simply lies as a matter of course, reflexively, repeatedly, and shamelessly.