The news about the Iran intelligence report is proving to be a negative double-edged sword for President Bush.
On one hand, it renews and continues to nurture growing credibility problems for the administration, which for many Americans now seems as trustworthy in official pronouncements as the administrations of Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson and Republican Richard M. Nixon.
On the other hand, if the assumption is made that there was no deliberate attempt to mislead, it further raises questions about the judgment and competency of the administration.
President Bush was told in August that Iran’s nuclear weapons program “may be suspended,” the White House said Wednesday, which seemingly contradicts the account of the meeting given by Bush Tuesday.
So already Mr. Bush’s words are inoperative, as a new explanation comes out. Not helpful to rebuilding already-damaged credibility.
Adm. Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, told Bush the new information might cause intelligence officials to change their assessment of the Iranian program, but said analysts needed to review the new data before making a final judgment, White House press secretary Dana Perino said late Wednesday.
“Director McConnell said that the new information might cause the intelligence community to change its assessment of Iran’s covert nuclear program, but the intelligence community was not prepared to draw any conclusions at that point in time, and it wouldn’t be right to speculate until they had time to examine and analyze the new data,” Perino said in a statement issued by the White House.
The new account from Perino seems to contradict the president’s version of his August conversation with McConnell and raised new questions about why Bush continued to warn the American public about a threat from Iran two months after being told a new assessment was in the works.
But one pattern that has emerged with the Bush administration which Democrats and Independent voters note and some Republicans who don’t belong to the let’s-always-adopt-the-official-line part of the GOP is that the White House seldom will admit it was wrong or exaggerated. It’ll parse words — a way as bad as the “it all depends what is is” way that Bill Clinton did…which was lambasted by Republicans for years.
But Perino said there was no conflict between her statement and Bush’s Tuesday account of the meeting, when he said McConnell “didn’t tell me what the information was.”
“The president wasn’t given the specific details” of the revised intelligence estimate, which was released Monday, Perino said.
Question: as a MANAGER shouldn’t he have asked for details before speaking?
Now, hold your breath for this one:
Nor did Bush mislead Americans in October, when he warned of a third world war triggered by Iran’s development of nuclear technology, she said.
“The president didn’t say we’re going to cause World War III,” Perino said. “He was saying he wanted to avoid World War III.”
Bush made a big issue of the fact that the U.S. had to act on this before one day people woke up and found themselves in WWIII. In fact, as it now turns out, it wasn’t quite yet at that risk point. So the problem is not with how his words were perceived by reporters but what he said and what implications came from the mouth of the Commander In Chief.
Meanwhile, a new theme emerged from some of Mr. Bush’s supporters yesterday — a theme that blossomed on some radio talk shows and among some conservative pundits: a suggestion that the report really can’t be trusted because someone is trying to undermine Bush. And who is that someone? Apparently the CIA.
In today’s Washington Post, former UN Ambassador John Bolton took a swipe at the Iran report:
Rarely has a document from the supposedly hidden world of intelligence had such an impact as the National Intelligence Estimate released this week. Rarely has an administration been so unprepared for such an event. And rarely have vehement critics of the “intelligence community” on issues such as Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction reversed themselves so quickly.
All this shows that we not only have a problem interpreting what the mullahs in Tehran are up to, but also a more fundamental problem: Too much of the intelligence community is engaging in policy formulation rather than “intelligence” analysis, and too many in Congress and the media are happy about it. President Bush may not be able to repair his Iran policy (which was not rigorous enough to begin with) in his last year, but he would leave a lasting legacy by returning the intelligence world to its proper function.
And:
We have lost many fruitful sources inside Iraq in recent years because of increased security and intelligence tradecraft by Iran. The sudden appearance of new sources should be taken with more than a little skepticism. In a background briefing, intelligence officials said they had concluded it was “possible” but not “likely” that the new information they were relying on was deception. These are hardly hard scientific conclusions. One contrary opinion came from — of all places — an unnamed International Atomic Energy Agency official, quoted in the New York Times, saying that “we are more skeptical. We don’t buy the American analysis 100 percent. We are not that generous with Iran.” When the IAEA is tougher than our analysts, you can bet the farm that someone is pursuing a policy agenda.
Do you sense there is an attempt to discredit a report that doesn’t have the conclusion Bolton wanted it to have?
That such a flawed product could emerge after a drawn-out bureaucratic struggle is extremely troubling. While the president and others argue that we need to maintain pressure on Iran, this “intelligence” torpedo has all but sunk those efforts, inadequate as they were. Ironically, the NIE opens the way for Iran to achieve its military nuclear ambitions in an essentially unmolested fashion, to the detriment of us all.
Bolton could be correct that some of the report could have been manipulated.
However, if a report like this comes out and is ignored or discredited because it doesn’t fit the agenda of people who wanted it to bolster their position, then we’re now not only living in a world where “fact-based journalism” is ailing, but where “fact-based” foreign policy formulation is truly on life support.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.