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Posted on Monday 10 December 2007


Listening to the howls and foot stomping tantrums from Newt Gingrich and John Bolton this past week as they reacted to the latest National Intelligence Estimate on Iran’s nuclear weapons program, one would think that communist jihadists bent on raping Mother Teresa on the tomb of the Unknown Soldier arrived in Washington. Gingrich called the estimate a “coup d’etat” by former State Department officials. And Bolton insists that the intelligence community engaged in policymaking rather than analysis. Harumph!!

Leave it to Newt Gingrich to believe that providing people with truth is the equivalent of a coup. And John Bolton–a black pot if ever there was one–is angry that intelligence is being used to fix a policy. That’s like listening to John Wayne Gacy complaining about men who get their jollies by raping and murdering teenage boys. Save the faux outrage Bolton.

Folks like Gingrich and Bolton only accept intelligence if it corresponds to their preconceived prejudices. Truth is largely irrelevant in their worldview. Just as long as the story line adheres to neocon orthodoxy, they are happy campers.

Where is the “politicization” or “policymaking” in the current NIE?

It does not exist. As someone who has worked and lived in both worlds it is easy to distinguish between intelligence analysis/assessment and making policy. Asking whether Iran has a nuclear weapons program or capability is an intelligence question. Deciding what to do (or not do) about an Iranian nuclear weapons program is the realm of policy making.
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Only this time, the fix is not in and the neocons don’t have full access to pull the strings. This time the intelligence community offered its factual judgments. The analysts do not infringe on the President’s right to decide what kind of policy he wants. They simply make it more difficult for him to pretend that the moon is made of green cheese and the earth is flat. George Bush is no longer entitled to only rely on his own misguided set of personal beliefs.  He is constrained from telling Americans that Iran is building nukes.  The Intelligence Community did its job–they gave the President their best judgment.  Will George Bush persist in building his Iranian fantasy?  That is the key question.
[Endless gratitude to joyhollywood for initially pointing me to Larry Johnson’s blog, No Quarter!]
Johnson is a former C.I.A. Agent, friend of Valerie Plame, who sees the forest instead of the trees. Like Olberman, he says what I think, but he says it better. Olberman points out one of the subtlties of the Bush spin machine below. When they found out that Iran was NO THREAT, instead of telling us what they knew, they changed their wording slightly. They went from "Iran is building WMD’s" to "Iran is acquiring the knowledge to build WMD’s" [as my classmate, Howard Morland, pointed out back in 1979, the knowledge about how to build WMD’s ain’t hard to come by].

Now Larry Johnson dissects the American Enterprise Institute reaction to the N.I.E. as touted by Newt Gingrich and John Bolton. Those State Department and C.I.A. Liberals are at it again, trying to set policy and undermine President Bush. Johnson’s article is a very clear rebuttal of this silliness. Bolton and Gingrich are calling foul because they don’t like the N.I.E. It undermines their plans for endless war in the Middle East. They create a McCarthy-like pseudo-community to rale against [those commies replaced with those Iranians]. We have been governed by this sort of paranoid rhetoric for seven long years. You’d think they’d tire of saying it after all this time, but, alas, paranoid people never tire of their fight with the forces of evil. Without such enemies, they really have nothing much to say…

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