1 Boring Old Man

Neck-Snapping Spin From the President

By concluding that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program four years ago, the national intelligence estimate released yesterday undermined a key element of President Bush’s foreign policy. It raised questions about whether the president and vice president knowingly misled the public about the danger posed by Iran. And it added to Bush’s profound credibility problems with the American people and the international community. But to hear Bush talk about it at the White House press conference this morning, the new NIE vindicated his beliefs and makes his warnings about Iran more potent.

It was neck-snapping spin even by Bush standards. He intentionally misread the report’s central point, failed to acknowledge a huge change in his argument for why Iran is dangerous and exhibited pure bullheaded stubbornness. When Chicago Tribune reporter Mark Silva noted that Bush appeared dispirited and asked if he was troubled about what this would do to his credibility, Bush replied: "No, I’m feeling pretty spirited, pretty good about life, and have made the decision to come before you so I can explain the NIE. And I have said Iran is dangerous, and the NIE doesn’t do anything to change my opinion about the danger Iran poses to the world. Quite the contrary. I’m using this NIE as an opportunity to continue to rally our colleagues and allies"…

"And so, you know, kind of Psychology 101 ain’t working. It’s just not working, you know? I am — I understand the issues. I clearly see the problems and I’m going to use the NIE to continue to rally the international community for the sake of peace." Yesterday’s report came as something as a shock to the general public. Bush and Vice President Cheney have long asserted that Iran was actively seeking nuclear weapons, and Cheney, in particular, had been accelerating what some observers saw as a drumbeat for war. But the nation’s 16 intelligence agencies didn’t come to their conclusion overnight. In fact, this NIE had been in the works for 18 months, during which some of its authors were reportedly harried by Cheney for not being sufficiently hawkish.

But even if he wouldn’t admit it, his central indictment against the Iranian government has suddenly become a great deal more nebulous: "The NIE says this is a country that had a covert nuclear weapons program, which, by the way, they have failed to disclose, even today," Bush said. "The danger is, is that they can enrich [uranium], play like they got a civilian [nuclear] program – or have a civilian program, or claim it’s a civilian program – and pass the knowledge to a covert military program. And then the danger is, is at some point in the future, they show up with a weapon."

He hasn’t reached these heights depths since his interview when it became clear that Hussein’s Weapons of Mass Destruction didn’t exist. He said, "You’ve got to understand. Saddam Hussein is a bad man." Like we hadn’t heard him imploring us to stop Hussein because of his Weapons of Mass Destruction, like we haven’t heard him talk about little other than Iran’s Nuclear Bomb program for the last several years. And I’m intrigued by what "Psychology 101 ain’t working" actually means to him. Is it a paranoid statement, like "my enemies aren’t going to get to me with this N.I.E.?" That’s what it sounds like. This N.I.E. wasn’t prepared by his enemies. It is a consensus of our collective sixteen Intelligence Agencies. It’s not something the Democrats came up with, or some blogger wrote. It’s the net product of the agencies we pay millions of dollars to provide us with information to use in making foreign policy decisions.

Paranoid people rarely change their conclusions when confronted with evidence to the contrary. It’s because the conclusion is performing some vital function in their own psychology. For example, the severely disturbed psychotic person might explain his own internal disintegration as the work of some outside force. Showing the fallacies in their logic is of no avail because it has no effect on how they feel inside. One has the impression that today Bush is defending himself "inside" rather than talking about foreign policy, saying, "They aren’t going to get to me with this. I’m still right!"