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Can't Handle the Truth
In his memoir, Bush laments: "I don't know why the NIE was written the way it was." Whatever the explanation, the NIE had a big impact -- and not a good one. Spelling out how the Estimate had tied his hands "on the military side," Bush included this (apparently unedited) kicker:
"But after the NIE, how could I possible explain using the military to destroy the nuclear facilities of a country the intelligence community said had no active nuclear weapons program?"
Thankfully, not even Dick Cheney could persuade Bush to repair the juggernaut and let it loose for war on Iran. The avuncular Vice President has made it clear that he was very disappointed in his protà ©gà ©. On Aug. 30, 2009, he told "Fox News Sunday" that he was isolated among Bush advisers in his enthusiasm for war with Iran.
"I was probably a bigger advocate of military action than any of my colleagues," Cheney said when asked whether the Bush administration should have launched a pre-emptive attack on Iran before leaving office.
Bush briefed Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert before the NIE was released. Bush later said publicly that he did not agree with his own intelligence agencies. [For more on the Bush memoir's conflicts with the truth, see Consortiumnews.com's "George W. Bush: Dupe or Deceiver?"]
And it is entirely possible that the Iran-war juggernaut would have been repaired and turned loose anyway, were it not for strong opposition by the top military brass who convinced Bush that Cheney, his neocon friends and Olmert had no idea of the chaos that war with Iran would unleash.
There's lots of evidence that this is precisely what Joint Chiefs Chairman Mike Mullen and then-CENTCOM commander Adm. William Fallon told Bush, in no uncertain terms. And it is a safe bet that these two were among those hinting broadly to Bush that the NIE was likely to "leak," if he did not himself make its key judgments public.
Whew!
What About Now
The good news is that Cheney is gone and that Adm. Mullen is still around.
The bad news is that Adm. Fallon was sacked for making it explicitly clear that, "We're not going to do Iran on my watch," and there are few flag officers with Fallon's guts and honesty. Moreover, President Barack Obama continues to show himself to be an invertebrate vis-Ã -vis Israel and its neocon disciples.
Meanwhile, a draft NIE update on Iran's nuclear program, completed earlier this year, is dead in its tracks, apparently because anti-Iran hawks inside the Obama administration are afraid it will leak. It is said to repeat pretty much the same conclusions as the NIE from 2007.
There are other ominous signs. The new Director of National Intelligence, retired Air Force Lt. Gen. James Clapper, is a subscriber to the Tenet school of malleability. It was Clapper whom former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld put in charge of imagery analysis to ensure that no one would cast serious doubt on all those neocon and Iraqi "defector" reports of WMD in Iraq.
And, when no WMD caches were found, it was Clapper who blithely suggested, without a shred of good evidence, that Saddam Hussein had sent them to Syria. This was a theory also being pushed by neocons both to deflect criticism of their false assurances about WMD in Iraq and to open a new military front against another Israeli nemesis, Syria.
In these circumstances, there may be some value in keeping the NIE update bottled up. At least that way, Clapper and other malleable managers won't have the chance to play chef to another "cooked-to-order" analysis.
On the other hand, the neocons and our invertebrate President may well decide to order Clapper to "fix" the updated Estimate to fit in better with a policy of confrontation toward Iran. In that case, the new Director of National Intelligence might want to think twice. For Clapper could come a cropper. How?
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