Iran NIE fallout: Either Bush is lying or he's stupid

[Paulie]

"Other than Israel"... who will retalliate in like an kind to an Iranian nucelar strike...

Tell me you understand the horriffic world-wide consequences of Isreal dumping its arsenal on Iran.

Tell me you understand the same thing can be said if the US does.

 

[Mr.Conley]

So moderately confident now means "who the hell knows"? Nice equivocating.

 

[doniston]

like i said, why beat around the Bush?

ijit bushwacker

I got it the first time.-------------and discarded it.

 

[Annie]

So moderately confident now means "who the hell knows"? Nice equivocating.

I thought you were brighter than that, those parameters came from the NIE report...

 

[Chips Rafferty]

"I'm very sorry the Bush comment scared the bejeezus out of you...."

it certainly didn't scare ME, it just made me sigh and shake my head in amazement that enough of my countrymen were fooled by this dullard - twice!

"but Bush is right....IF the nitwits running Iran should achieve the nuke capacity they were working on in the past, and use it to achieve the results they have been threatening, world war, or at least a very big conflict could be on the horizon....and that is exactly what Bush said....I think even most, if not all Dems running for president right now would agree with that if asked point blank....and it makes sense to make everyone aware of that danger....why does everyone, including Dems make demands for safe ports and searching container ships, etc....we don't do it to prevent toys with lead paint from entering our ports....or some such crap...."

the point is: after getting the knowledge he received months before his WWIII speech, such an IF/THEN Statement is purely rhetorical. He could just as easily have replaced Iran with Nigeria or Chad or Lithuania... and just imagine how much safer we could make our ports with the TRILLION dollars we've flushed down the shitter in Iraq! Did you get a chance to read The Fifth Horseman yet?

"and it makes no difference if its in 2009, 2012 or 2015...whatever...the insane public rhetoric coming from Iran can't be taken as fluff and bluff....these aren't rational people in the western sense....and it is in the worlds interest to prevent them from getting nukes...."

that doesn't change the fact that Bush misleads using fear.

The C.I.A.’s destruction of the tapes came in the midst of Congressional and legal scrutiny about its secret detention program, according to current and former government officials.

President Bush “has no recollection of being made aware of the tapes or their destruction before yesterday,” the chief White House spokeswoman, Dana Perino, said today.[/

Obviously this mushroom, like his gullible supporters, wouldn't know if John Holmes was up his arse with an armful of chairs!!

 

[jillian]

Bush: Pathological liar or idiot-in-chief?
Olbermann: Timeline for Iran’s nuclear ambitions was clear, but he kept on

SPECIAL COMMENT
By Keith Olbermann
Anchor, 'Countdown'
MSNBC

There are few choices more terrifying than the one Mr. Bush has left us with tonight.

We have either a president who is too dishonest to restrain himself from invoking World War III about Iran at least six weeks after he had to have known that the analogy would be fantastic, irresponsible hyperbole, or we have a president too transcendently stupid not to have asked, at what now appears to have been a series of opportunities to do so, whether the fairy tales he either created or was fed were still even remotely plausible.

A pathological presidential liar, or an idiot-in-chief. It is the nightmare scenario of political science fiction: A critical juncture in our history and, contained in either answer, a president manifestly unfit to serve, and behind him in the vice presidency an unapologetic warmonger who has long been seeing a world visible only to himse

After spokeswoman Dana Perino’s announcement from the White House late last night, the timeline is inescapable and clear.

In August the president was told by his hand-picked major-domo of intelligence, Mike McConnell, a flinty, high-strung-looking, worrying-warrior who will always see more clouds than silver linings, that what “everybody thought” about Iran might be, in essence, crap.

Yet on Oct. 17, the president said of Iran and its President Ahmadinejad:

“I’ve told people that if you’re interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them from have the knowledge to make a nuclear weapon.”

And as he said that, Mr. Bush knew that at bare minimum there was a strong chance that his rhetoric was nothing more than words with which to scare the Iranians.

Or was it, Sir, to scare the Americans?

Does Iran not really fit into the equation here? Have you just scribbled it into the fill-in-the-blank on the same template you used to scare us about Iraq?

In August, any commander-in-chief still able-minded or uncorrupted or both, Sir, would have invoked the quality the job most requires: mental flexibility.

A bright man, or an honest man, would have realized no later than the McConnell briefing that the only true danger about Iran was the damage that could be done by an unhinged, irrational Chicken Little of a president shooting his mouth off, backed up by only his own hysteria and his own delusions of omniscience.

Not Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Mr. Bush.

The Chicken Little of presidents is the one, Sir, that you see in the mirror.

And the mind reels at the thought of a vice president fully briefed on the revised intel as long as two weeks ago, briefed on the fact that Iran abandoned its pursuit of this imminent threat four years ago, who never bothered to mention it to his boss.

It is nearly forgotten today, but throughout much of Ronald Reagan’s presidency it was widely believed that he was little more than a front man for some never-viewed, behind-the-scenes string-puller.

Today, as evidenced by this latest remarkable, historic malfeasance, it is inescapable that Dick Cheney is either this president’s evil ventriloquist or he thinks he is.

What servant of any of the 42 previous presidents could possibly withhold information of this urgency and gravity and wind up back at his desk the next morning, instead of winding up before a congressional investigation or a criminal one?

Mr. Bush, if you can still hear us, if you did not previously agree to this scenario in which Dick Cheney is the actual detective and you’re Remington Steele, you must disenthrall yourself: Mr. Cheney has usurped your constitutional powers, cut you out of the information loop and led you down the path to an unprecedented presidency in which the facts are optional, the intel is valued less than the hunch and the assistant runs the store.

The problem is, Sir, your assistant is robbing you and your country blind.

Not merely in monetary terms, Mr. Bush, but, more important, of the traditions and righteousness for which we have stood, at great risk, for centuries: honesty, law, moral force.

Mr. Cheney has helped, Sir, to make your administration into the kind our ancestors saw in the 1860s and 1870s and 1880s, the ones that abandoned Reconstruction and sent this country marching backward into the pit of American apartheid.

Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Arthur, Cleveland — presidents who will be remembered only in a blur of failure, Mr. Bush.

Presidents who will be remembered only as functions of those who opposed them, the opponents whom history proved right.

Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Arthur, Cleveland ... Bush.

Would that we could let this president off the hook by seeing him only as marionette or moron.

But a study of the mutation of his language about Iran proves that though he may not be very good at it, he is, himself, still a manipulative, Machiavellian snake-oil salesman.

MORE

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22134108/

 

[Annie]

Pretty good take:

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/mesh/2007/12/iran_nie_a_prediction/

From Stephen Peter Rosen

For the most part, the arguments about the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran have been and will be a debate, not about intelligence, but about Bush foreign policy. But the NIE also provides an opportunity to assess our own ability to do assessments, by publicly stating what we think the consequences of the NIE will be, and why. We can then periodically check to see how well we did, and what we understood correctly, and if we made mistakes, to see what kind of mistakes we made. Being publicly wrong is not much fun, but this issue is serious, so I will go first.

In my view, the Iran program halted in 2003 because of the massive and initially successful American use of military power in Iraq. The United States offered no “carrots” to Iran, but only wielded an enormous stick. This increased the Iranians’ desire to minimize the risks to themselves, and so they halted programs that could unambiguously be identified as a nuclear weapons program. They were guarding themselves against the exposure of a weapons program by US or Israeli clandestine intelligence collection, and were not trying to signal the United States that they were looking to negotiate. They did not publicly announce this halt because if they did so, they would be perceived as weak within Iran, and within the region. By continuing the enrichment program, they kept the weapon option open.

If this is true, the Iranian government responds to imminent threats of force, not economic sanctions or diplomatic concessions. If that is the case, as the threat of US use of force goes down, the likelihood that Iran restarts its program goes up. Since the threat of US use of force went down in 2007, it is likely that the program restarted in that time frame. The threat of Israeli use of force, however, remained high, and went up after the attack on Syria. The NIE, however, ensured that there would be no US or Israeli use of force for the foreseeable future. So the prediction is that warhead production activity has restarted, and will produce a useable gun-type design quickly. Given observable uranium enrichment activity, enough uranium will be available for one bomb in one year. It does not makes sense for a country to test its first and only weapon when it has none in reserve to deter attacks. So the first test is not likely before two years from now or late 2009.

What will Iranian behavior be after the first test? All countries, with the exception of India, that have developed their own nuclear weapon, have transferred that technology to other countries. The technology, not a weapon, is easy to transfer in a way that can be concealed, has high value, and can be traded for money or other goods. So Iran will transfer technology to its friends. Nuclear weapons can be used to intimidate non-nuclear countries, and new nuclear powers, including the United States, have overestimated the utility of such threats. The goal of Iran is to force the military departure of the US from the Persian Gulf. US military bases in the region are now in small Gulf states and Iraq. The prediction is that the Iranians will use nuclear carrots and sticks to induce Gulf states to ask the United States to withdraw from their current bases, sometime after 2009.

Finally, Iran appears to have a long tradition of manipulating perceptions of itself to make it look stronger than it is, so the prediction is that the test will be accompanied by exaggerated claims of nuclear weapons production.

 

[jillian]

I think I'll go with my post on the subject.

Actually, I take that back. Yours is interesting, too.

 

[Mr.Conley]

I thought you were brighter than that, those parameters came from the NIE report...

No, not at all. The "moderately confident" came from the NIE. The "who the Hell knows" is your blogger's invention.