So Much For Pre-Emption

Brother Hinderaker quotes, er, liberally from an impending Jack Kelley column that discusses with foreboding Iran's arming of invading terrorist groups operating from Syria, what that portends for Tehran's drive for nuclear weapons, and the laughably optimistic CIA report released last week that the mullahs are still a decade away from that goal:

From whence might the [Iraqi] insurgents have acquired such weapons and expertise? NBC’s Jim Miklaszewski provided a hint in a broadcast Thursday:

"U.S. military and intelligence officials tell NBC News that American soldiers intercepted a large shipment of high explosives, smuggled into northeastern Iraq from Iran only last week.

"The officials say the shipment contained dozens of shaped charges manufactured recently," Miklaszewski said.

This was old news to Iran expert Michael Ledeen, who’d learned about the seizure a week before Miklaszewski’s broadcast. A reporter was baffled by Ledeen’s ho-hum response.

"So what?" Ledeen said. "It happens almost every day."

The reporter was amazed that the Shia Muslims who run Iran would supply deadly weapons to Sunni extremists in Iraq who use them, often, to kill Shia Muslims.

The reporter’s amazement was a product of the same blindness that declared there could be no cooperation between Saddam Hussein and al Qaida, because the latter were religious fanatics who disliked Saddam because he was secular.

They forgot the oldest adage in diplomacy is the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

***

It is within this context that one must assess the leak to the Washington Post Tuesday of portions of a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran. The portions leaked said analysts didn’t think Iran could develop a nuclear bomb for another ten years.

The analysis is preposterous on its face, because we developed an atom bomb from scratch in less than four years, and knowledge about how to build one has spread widely since then. The estimate by Israel’s Mossad that Iran will have the bomb in two to four years almost certainly is closer to the mark.

I’m more interested in the fact of the leak than in its contents. It appears that a faction within the CIA is once again attempting to use the selective leaking of classified material to influence Administration policy.

"There may be some involved in the report who are frightened that Bush would use anything more imminent as a pretext to bomb," said Henry Sokolski, director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center, who told the Christian Science Monitor that the CIA’s estimate is "absurd." [emphases added]

What is most concerning about this dangerous ploy from the faction that Rocketman aptly calls "a liberal organization from the beginning" isn't the ploy itself or the motivations behind it, which are par for the course, but that the Bushies appear completely cowed into accepting it, to our potential national peril, judging by their utter reluctance to defend their vindicated WMD justification for the liberation of Iraq:

President Bush's decision to concede the argument that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction has hurt his credibility badly, with a majority of Americans now saying he lied when he took the country to war based on a threat that didn't exist.

A Gallup survey last week found that a majority of Americans - 51% - now believe that Bush "deliberately misled the people when he asserted Iraq had weapons of mass destruction."

On Friday, an Associated Press-Ipsos poll found that 50% no longer think he's an honest leader - with 48% disagreeing.

If, on the other hand, weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq, there's no question those numbers would be dramatically different.

Bush's war rationale would have been completely vindicated - and families of hero GI's wouldn't be wrestling with gut wrenching questions about whether their sacrifices were worth it.

That's why it's so abominably tragic - and downright irresponsible - for the Bush White House to continue to ignore the evidence that Saddam Hussein did, in fact, pose a WMD threat.

Part of this was inevitable. Because Bush wasted six months fruitlessly trying to cajole the UN into backing Saddam Hussein's ouster, Mr. Cheetos had the time to evacuate his WMD stockpile to Syria. Because of that there were no WMD stockpiles to be found in the territory to which Coalition forces had access. And because the President had made "disarming" Saddam the primary focus of Operation Iraqi Freedom, that undermined the central rationale for the operation.

Ironically, had the focus remained on getting those WMDs, that could have provided more than sufficient justification for keeping the tanks rolling straight into Damascus and the Bekaa Valley, where Saddam's WMDs were stashed. Instead, the White House knuckled under to its critics, conceding the WMD argument and losing the stomach for keeping the military option - inevitable if the remaining "terror masters" in Syria and Iran are to be rolled up - open. Assuming, of course, that they ever planned to go beyond Iraq, which no looks like it was never in the cards anyway.

This is a double irony because it was the very same CIA (along with every other intelligence service in the Western world) that asserted Saddam had WMD stockpiles in the first place, by contast with their underestimation of same prior to the first Gulf War. In other words, it was they who failed the President, not the President who "misled" the country. And yet the President has never bothered offering the following arguments, which would have bolstered his own credibility and put the focus of public inmity on the CIA, where it belongs:

• If you knew that Saddam Hussein was sitting on a stockpile of 500 tons of yellowcake uranium - and storing it at his nuclear weapons development plant - would you still think the Iraqi dictator posed no WMD threat?

• If you learned that Saddam had ordered his top nuclear physicist to hide centrifuge parts from U.N. weapons inspectors and keep them available for future use - would it have been a good idea to leave Saddam in power?

• And if you knew that Saddam had begun to enrich that uranium to the point where weapons inspectors feared it could be turned into a terrorist dirty bomb - would you still think it was a mistake to launch a preemptive invasion?

And yet....

...in hundreds of hours of interviews spent defending the Iraq war, Condi, Rummy, Cheney or even the President himself never mention Saddam's al Tuwaitha uranium stockpile - or the order he gave to Dr. Obeidi to keep Iraq's centrifuge program ready.

And now, when those same "enemies within" at Langley are genuinely twisting intelligence to misleadingly lowball the Iranian nuclear threat, the President whose foreign policy - and reputation - they're trying to sabotage is meekly and quietly going along, without lifting a rhetorical finger in his own defense.

Conspiracy theorists have for years suspected FDR of knowlingly and deliberately allowing the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in order to get the foreign policy initiative he most wanted - American entry into the war against Nazi Germany. It's not remotely difficult for me to see the same people who are doing their level best to smear George W. Bush as a "lying warmonger" hatching a similar explanation for the act of nuclear terrorism that is guaranteed to ensue from the mullahgarchy's being allowed to hit nuclear paydirt - based upon yet another round of "faulty" intelligence.