Our Ms. Brooks: The White House Jabberwocky
This week Rosa Brooks offers her take on the NIE report on Iran's freeze of nuclear weapons development and the White House response to it. After a few well placed shots in the direction of our intelligence community("Yes! Because we are a great and powerful nation, we have 16 intelligence agencies"), Ms. Brooks takes aim at the totally expected response of the White House to the news that everything the president has been telling us for the past few months is, well, a little skewed.
...if tracking the ever-shifting intel gives you whiplash, you can always recover by contemplating the Bush administration's national security policies, which are frozen in place for all eternity. Just as the breakdown in prewar U.S. intelligence on Iraq never led the administration to seriously reconsider its war plans, the intelligence community's about-face on Iran appears only to have hardened Bush's determination to proceed exactly as previously planned.
To most of humanity, the NIE contains extremely good news: If international pressure led Iran to stop trying to make nuclear weapons in 2003, it means that the Iranian regime is less dangerously crazy than it occasionally seems. As the NIE notes, it appears that "Tehran's decisions are guided by a cost-benefit approach rather than a rush to a weapon irrespective of the political, economic and military costs." In other words: We can probably cut some deals with these people.
But to Bush, the NIE isn't good news, it's "a warning signal." The report shows that "they had the program. They halted the program. And the reason why it's a warning signal is that they could restart it." So full speed ahead with bellicose rhetoric and punitive sanctions. [Emphasis added]
Rather than take a step back to make a reassessment (which would, of course, require the current administration to admit that maybe the current US posture is the wrong one), Mr. Bush has chosen to ratchet up the saber rattling, thereby raising the very real possibility of the WWIII scenario he posited back in September.
If nothing else, the current administration is consistent. Unfortunately for us and for the world, it has been consistently wrong.
...if tracking the ever-shifting intel gives you whiplash, you can always recover by contemplating the Bush administration's national security policies, which are frozen in place for all eternity. Just as the breakdown in prewar U.S. intelligence on Iraq never led the administration to seriously reconsider its war plans, the intelligence community's about-face on Iran appears only to have hardened Bush's determination to proceed exactly as previously planned.
To most of humanity, the NIE contains extremely good news: If international pressure led Iran to stop trying to make nuclear weapons in 2003, it means that the Iranian regime is less dangerously crazy than it occasionally seems. As the NIE notes, it appears that "Tehran's decisions are guided by a cost-benefit approach rather than a rush to a weapon irrespective of the political, economic and military costs." In other words: We can probably cut some deals with these people.
But to Bush, the NIE isn't good news, it's "a warning signal." The report shows that "they had the program. They halted the program. And the reason why it's a warning signal is that they could restart it." So full speed ahead with bellicose rhetoric and punitive sanctions. [Emphasis added]
Rather than take a step back to make a reassessment (which would, of course, require the current administration to admit that maybe the current US posture is the wrong one), Mr. Bush has chosen to ratchet up the saber rattling, thereby raising the very real possibility of the WWIII scenario he posited back in September.
If nothing else, the current administration is consistent. Unfortunately for us and for the world, it has been consistently wrong.
Labels: Iran
posted by Diane at 3:04 AM
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