Intelligence Reports: Dismissing experts

 

It seems once this administration has decided to declare another country an enemy -- and, potentially, attack it -- little will change the course it has blindly set for itself. Not even the intelligence provided by one of its own agencies.

To wit, Newsweek reports that while President Bush has continued to label Iran a threat, he has been skirting the issue of what a National Intelligence Estimate report stated in December, that Iran suspended its nuclear program years ago. But the news magazine reports that behind closed doors, Bush whispers the sort of sweet nothings in Ehud Olmert's ears that make the Israeli prime minister weak in the knees. According to an insider quoted in the story, Bush "told the Israelis that he can't control what the intelligence community says, but that (the NIE's) conclusions don't reflect his own views." Bush doesn't seem to realize that nothing can prevent Iranian engineers from acquiring said "know-how." In fact, the genesis of Iran's nuclear program is the Atoms for Peace program, which it signed onto in 1957. The U.S. did nothing but help the program through the '70s, when it built Iran reactors and trained its engineers.

And the U.S. didn't seem to mind when in June 1974 the shah declared that Iran would have nuclear weapons "without a doubt and sooner than one would think." Regardless, Iran doesn't have a nuclear weapons program now.

But Bush seems to be leaning toward attacking Iran over what our own intelligence says is not a weapons program. It's almost as though he didn't learn a thing with his folly in Iraq.

Intelligence Reports: Dismissing experts