Bush doesn’t answer a lot of questions from reporters, so when he does, there’s almost always something interesting that comes of it. Yesterday was no exception.
Reuters reporter: “Mr. President, thank you. Why do you think the CIA’s assessment of conditions in Iraq are so much at odds with the optimism that you and Prime Minister Allawi are expressing at the moment?”
Bush: “The CIA laid out a — several scenarios that said, life could be lousy, like could be okay, life could be better. And they were just guessing as to what the conditions might be like.” (emphasis added)
It’s only Wednesday, but this will probably be the most idiotic thing the president will say this week.
First of all, it’s painfully obvious Bush didn’t read this critically important report and/or didn’t understand the summary of the report from the White House staffer who did read it. The CIA did not just lay out a few scenarios, ranging from good to bad.
The estimate outlines three possibilities for Iraq through the end of 2005, with the worst case being developments that could lead to civil war, the officials said. The most favorable outcome described is an Iraq whose stability would remain tenuous in political, economic and security terms.
The “several scenarios” included full-blown civil war (which Bush apparently describes as “lousy”) or, at best, an unstable country that remains one of the “most violent places in the Middle East.” This is what Bush describes as the “life is better” scenario.
Secondly, and far more importantly, the president appears to have no idea what the National Intelligence Estimate even is.
To suggest that the CIA was “just guessing” when it described the possible future of Iraq is unusually dumb, even for Bush. (And considering he’s never been the sharpest tack in the box, that’s saying something.) The NIE is not just some agents sitting around throwing darts at a board; it is, as the New York Times recently described it, the culmination of “concise, carefully written statements of intelligence analysts’ conclusions.” Or, as Slate’s Fred Kaplan explained:
A National Intelligence Estimate is not an ordinary report. It marks the one occasion when the Central Intelligence Agency warrants its name, acting as a central entity that pulls together the assessments of all the myriad intelligence departments, noting where they agree and where they differ.
It is, in other words, the best information the CIA has. Bush has already proven himself more interested in his own agenda than quality intelligence, but for the president to dismiss the NIE as guesswork demonstrates that he doesn’t even realize why the document is written in the first place. The president is either in deep denial or his tenuous grasp on current events is getting worse. Or perhaps both.
And as long as we’re talking about the NIE, I’d like to add that the CIA prepared a 93-page estimate in 2002 on intelligence regarding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. It was filled with caveats, qualifiers, and footnotes of interagency dissent on several key points, all of which raised criticial questions about whether war was necessary to protect the U.S. And yet, by the White House’s own admission, the president did not actually read the document before launching an invasion.
The mind reels.