http://www.usnews.com/usnews/politics/bull...etin_071205.htmUS NEWS and World Report
WASHINGTON NEWSBush On The Defensive Over New Iran IntelWednesday, December 5, 2007
One day after the release of a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) that concludes Iran does not currently have a nuclear weapons program, President Bush held a press conference in which he urged key allies to maintain the current pressure on the Islamic Republic. In fact, the AP reports, Bush said the new intel "contradicting earlier US assessments...would not prompt him to take off the table the possibility of pre-emptive military action against Iran."
Media accounts of the press conference are almost universally negative toward the President. ABC World News, for example, said last night Bush "was instantly and consistently defensive." NBC Nightly News prefaced its report saying, "The 'Washington Post' is running an analysis story on the internet for tomorrow's paper with the headline, 'Neck Snapping Spin' from the President. They're talking about the President's news conference today." (The piece NBC referred to was in fact an online opinion piece not intended for the newspapers' print edition by Dan Froomkin.) NBC also reported Bush was "a president on the defensive."
Print media outlets also suggest the new intel findings and Bush's reaction to them raise questions about the President's "credibility." So much so, says the Capitol Hill newspaper The Hill, that "several" Democrats "said that Congress should investigate the discrepancy between the Bush administration's recent doomsday rhetoric on Iran and the NIE's judgments."
McClatchy says the NIE "has dealt another blow to Bush's credibility -- which already was low over his false claims about illicit weapons in Iraq -- because he was aware of the findings when he warned on Oct. 17 that Iran's quest for nuclear weapons could ignite World War III." USA Today also notes that it was the President's first press conference "since warning in October that a nuclear Iran could lead to 'World War III.'" The President also "said he learned in August that there was new information on Iran's nuclear program that needed to be analyzed. He said he did not see the specific findings until last week." In similar reporting, the New York Times says Bush "opened himself to new criticism over his credibility."
The Chicago Tribune's Mark Silva also says this morning there are "new questions" about Bush's "credibility on...security issues." In her New York Times column, Maureen Dowd mentions that during the news conference yesterday, Silva told the President , "I can't help but read your body language this morning, Mr. President. ... You seem somehow dispirited, somewhat dispirited." Bush is said to have replied, "This is like, all of a sudden, it's like Psychology 101, you know?"
Another major issue this morning is how and why the reversal on Iran on the part of the US intelligence community came about. The Los Angeles Times says that "as US intelligence officials sought Tuesday to explain the remarkable reversal, they pointed to two factors: the emergence of crucial information over the summer, and a determination to avoid repeating the mistakes that preceded the Iraq war." The New York Times, meanwhile, says the intel "reversal" on Iran "was based on 'a great discovery' by American intelligence agencies, but neither he nor other officials would elaborate." The Washington Post, Detroit News and New York Times trace the impetus for the reversal to the lessons learned from the Iraq WMD fiasco.
Conservatives Don't Buy New Intel And Neither Does IAEA. The Wall Street Journal reports the NIE "has reopened long-simmering tensions between military hard-liners in the Bush administration and the intelligence community. A number of American hawks, both inside and outside the administration, charged that intelligence services were playing down the Iranian nuclear threat in an excess of caution after their 2002 reports on Iraq proved to overestimate Saddam Hussein's nuclear ambitions. ... 'Make no mistake: This national intelligence estimate has been written by people who've been reading about Iraq for years,' said a US official working on Iran." He "criticized the report as lacking enough data on Iran to draw meaningful judgments," and "said a number of officials working on the Iranian sanctions were blindsided by the report, only having gotten wind of it Monday afternoon. 'There are a lot of conservatives in this administration who don't believe this report,' the official said."
The conservative Wall Street Journal editorial board, meanwhile, says that its "confidence" in the report "is not heightened by the fact that the NIE's main authors include three former State Department officials with previous reputations as 'hyper-partisan anti-Bush officials,' according to an intelligence source." They are "Tom Fingar, formerly of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research; Vann Van Diepen, the National Intelligence Officer for WMD; and Kenneth Brill, the former US Ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)."
Surprisingly, the New York Times reports the International Atomic Energy Agency "on Tuesday publicly embraced the new American intelligence assessment stating that Iran had halted its nuclear weapons effort, but in truth the agency is taking a more cautious approach in drawing conclusions about Iran's nuclear program." A "senior official close to the agency" said, "To be frank, we are more skeptical. ... We don't buy the American analysis 100 percent. We are not that generous with Iran."
Push For Tougher Sanctions Going Nowhere? Efforts to toughen sanctions on Iran appear to be already fraying. McClatchy reports a "State Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity," said, "A new [UN] resolution is going to be very hard to get, if not impossible." Meanwhile, "two other US officials indicated that the administration could be forced to adopt a less confrontational policy to maintain a semblance of international unity on Iran. That shift could entail the United States joining European powers in talks with Tehran." The Wall Street Journal, meanwhile, reports China "indicated it would oppose a new round of economic sanctions against Tehran in light of the new national intelligence estimate," and "even Arab countries, historically fearful of Iran, are showing reluctance to back an aggressive US strategy to challenge Iran." The Washington Post, AP, New York Times and Christian Science Monitor run similar stories.
Dems Mull New Iraq Strategy
The Washington Post reports this morning that "facing increasing evidence of military progress in Iraq," Democratic congressional leaders "are eyeing a shift in legislative strategy that would abandon a link between $50 billion in additional war funding sought by President Bush to a timetable for withdrawal of US troops. Instead they would tie the measure to political advances by the Iraqi government." House Democratic Caucus Chairman Rahm Emanuel "is examining a new approach, releasing war funds in small increments, with further installments tied to specific performance measures for Iraq's politicians." House Speaker Nancy Pelosi "remains skeptical."
According to Roll Call reports Democrats have begun "creating some rhetorical flexibility for themselves as they gear up for long-awaited negotiations with the White House over funding both the government and the Iraq War." Senate Democratic leaders are "tacitly acknowledging that in order to get the entire federal government funded for 2008 they may have to give some ground." The Hill meanwhile, reports Emanuel told reporters, "The country needs more cooperation and compromise from the president, less confrontation and complaints." Speaker Pelosi "called on Bush to 'tone down his rhetoric, put down his veto pen and work with Congress.'" On the other hand, according to another article from The Hill, Congressional Republican leaders "are split over how much backing they will give to President Bush in his fiscal fight with the Democrats." The House GOP, "keen to reconnect with what many regard as lost Republican principles of fiscal restraint and small government, has supported the president's attack on Democratic spending plans." But Senate GOP leaders "have mixed feelings."
Can Democrats Take Credit For The Surge? Brookings' Michael O'Hanlon, in USA Today, writes, "Without a Democratic takeover of the Congress in 2006, there is little chance that President Bush would have acknowledged his Iraq policy to be failing, and that Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker would have been accorded the resources and the policy latitude needed to radically improve the situation on the ground." While Democrats "were not the authors of the surge and in fact generally opposed it...without their pressure, it probably never would have happened."
Iraq Progress May Be Short-Lived The New York Times reports on its front page that the reduced violence in Iraq "stems from three significant developments, but the clock is running on all of them, Iraqi officials and analysts warn." Iraqi officials "attribute the relative calm to a huge increase in the number of Sunni Arab rebels who have turned their guns on jihadists instead of American troops; a six-month halt to military action by the militia of a top Shiite leader, Moktada al-Sadr; and the increased number of American troops on the streets here." However, they "stress that all of these changes can be reversed, and on relatively short notice."