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Part of the problem has been the new marketers. With Andy Card, Karl Rove, Dan Bartlett and Tony Snow gone, it is amateur hour for White House spinners as they start-stop and rotate rationales for striking Iran.
And how to sell? Less than a year ago the focus was two-fold:
(1) What President Bush on Aug. 28 called “Tehran’s murderous activities” against our troops, including “240-millimeter rockets that have been manufactured in Iran and that had been provided to Iraqi extremist groups by Iranian agents;” and
(2) His ad-lib on Oct. 17: “We’ve got a leader in Iran who has announced he wants to destroy Israel…I take the threat of a nuclear Iran very seriously.”
Oops…
But where are those 240-millimeter rocket shells? For some reason, Gen. David Petraeus cannot deliver the goods.
As recently as April 25, his nominal boss, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Adm. Mike Mullen, invited the press to what was supposed to be a well-oiled Show-and-Tell exercise “in a couple of weeks,” to display a multitude of captured weapons from Iran.
But the show did not go on; it had to be cancelled when the weapons that had been found proved not to be of Iranian origin.
Ironically, one major hurdle would be getting senior Iraqi officials to go along with a hyped-up demonstration of weaponry from Iran.
Shortly after Mullen offered his invitation, the Iraqis announced that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki had formed his own Cabinet committee to investigate U.S. claims about Iranian weapons, and to attempt to “find tangible information and not information based on speculation.”
The other pretext is the hyped-up danger from Iran’s nuclear program.
Here, the administration suffered acute embarrassment when a vestigial group of honest intelligence analysts and supervisors had the temerity to serve up an un-fixed intelligence National Intelligence Estimate last fall that showed that Bush had been knowingly exaggerating the nuclear threat from Iran.
The declassified key findings of the NIE were released on Dec. 3. They included:
--“We judge with high confidence that in the fall of 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program; we also assess with moderate to high confidence that Tehran at a minimum is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons.”
--“We assess with moderate confidence Tehran has not restarted its nuclear weapons program as of mid-2007, but we do not know whether it currently intends to develop nuclear weapons.”
--“Tehran’s decision to halt its nuclear weapons program suggests it is less determined to develop nuclear weapons than we have been judging since 2005. Our assessment that the program probably was halted primarily in response to international pressure suggests Iran may be more vulnerable to influence on the issue than we judged previously.”
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