It may be stuck inexplicably on page A17, but this is a stunning article nevertheless.
U.N. inspectors investigating Iran’s nuclear program angrily complained to the Bush administration and to a Republican congressman yesterday about a recent House committee report on Iran’s capabilities, calling parts of the document “outrageous and dishonest” and offering evidence to refute its central claims.
Officials of the United Nations’ International Atomic Energy Agency said in a letter that the report contained some “erroneous, misleading and unsubstantiated statements.” The letter, signed by a senior director at the agency, was addressed to Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.), chairman of the House intelligence committee, which issued the report.
Let’s take a step back and set the stage: conservative Republicans start by complaining that the intelligence community isn’t giving lawmakers the damaging information they want about a Middle East foe. Intelligence officials say it’s because the damaging information doesn’t exist. Conservative Republicans proceed anyway, issuing a sweeping report blasting those officials and accusing the foe of dangerous weapons programs. In response, the IAEA insists the conservative Republicans are completely wrong.
Does any of this sound familiar?
I’m hopelessly naïve, but the one part of this that amazes me is that war proponents still believe they have any credibility left. Surely they remember that all of their Iraq-related claims were wrong while all of the IAEA’s conclusions were correct, don’t they?
Matt Yglesias concluded, “[T]hink about the quality — intellectual and moral — of the men and women who would look at the past several years of American and world history and decide that an outrageous and dishonest report on Iranian nuclear capacities was exactly the sort of thing the US Congress should spend its time working on. Simply put, there’s a miasma of insanity, dishonesty, and hubris floating around the circles they operate in that makes them grossly unfit to govern.”