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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Karen Lawrence who wrote (766635)	12/5/2007 10:32:47 PM
From: Karen Lawrence	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 769670

"The hard-liners in the administration are going to leak all kinds of things that were 'wrong' with this NIE" I think they were trying to redefine the problem with the idea that they could kind of blunt the impact of the NIE by doing this. I think they miscalculated. The NIE has had an enormous impact on the public debate -- particularly the decision to release the multipage document publicly, as opposed to just leaking [some details of] it. The White House miscalculated its ability to manage this. It has definitely made it more difficult for hard-liners like Cheney to make the case now for going down the military road. Right, a number of people have said that this takes the military option off the table. Do you think that's the case? I'm not so sure it takes the military option off the table. What were going to see over the next weeks if not months is a kind of battle of intelligence estimates. The hard-liners in the administration are going to keep leaking all kinds of things that were "wrong" with this NIE -- why the source wasn't good, why the intelligence wasn't good, why there is still a serious threat. The Israelis have already come out publicly, at the level of the defense minister, Ehud Barak, and said they flat-out disagree with the estimate. I think you're going to have Israel, and friends of Israel here, including the Cheney camp inside the administration, pushing to discredit the NIE in various ways. In other words, we'll see a battle going on over who really gets to define the intelligence assessment on which the president will make his decisions. Is it going to be the U.S. intelligence community? Or will it be some other set of actors who define it? Iran has been notoriously opaque to U.S. intelligence over the years, and I think these developments raise some familiar questions. How good is our intel on Iran? And aren't we dealing with another pretty powerful contradiction here in terms of the latest assessment? The contradiction is very powerful! You know, I have to say that I continue to believe that attacking Iran would be a disaster for the U.S. position in the region, and so far as this NIE makes it harder to justify doing so, I think that's a good thing. But the fact of the matter is that over the last two years, the U.S. intelligence community has been all over the map on this issue. And they've been colossally wrong on WMD issues in the past. So why should we put a high degree of confidence in any judgment they come to? Who knows if this reporting is really any good? Not only will the hawkish elements use that to try to discredit it and knock it down, they'll also say that even if the estimate is right, it doesn't matter. They'll say -- as Patrick Clawson already has written for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy [where Cheney gave his speech in October] -- this estimate doesn't change by one day our understanding of when Iran will actually get a nuclear weapon. The argument will be, "Even if everything in that estimate is correct, Iran is still a big problem." What impact will all this have on the politics of the 2008 presidential race? On the Republican side, I don't see it having that much of an impact. The Republicans have all staked out pretty extreme positions on Iran and I don't really see them backpedaling. But on the Democratic side it potentially gets very interesting. Barack Obama could really make an argument that Hillary Clinton's vote for the resolution naming the Iranian Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization was basically a vote for Bush's policy -- and was based on an assessment that we now know was wrong about the nature of the threat. And just like it was wrong for her to vote for the Iraq resolution and that showed bad judgment on her part, this showed the same kind of bad judgment -- and gee, wouldn't you like to have a president who got these things right the first time around? Obama is going to have to make the case for what this demonstrates about her, and I don't know if in the end he really has the guts to do that, but this could potentially affect the race. What about national security more broadly in the campaign? It certainly seemed Iran was going to be a key issue going into next year. Yeah, and I definitely think that for someone like Rudy Giuliani, if he were to become the nominee for his party he would want to make this a campaign about national security and about who's going to be more effective dealing with Iran. Depending on how the debate plays out during the next few months over what's really going on with Iran, he may still be able to do that. But it could also become harder for him to run that kind of campaign. Could the NIE findings cause a significant change in the Bush administration's approach to Iran? I don't think so -- they're saying Iran is still a danger and they're going to stick to that. They're not going to say, "Oh, well we better get serious about diplomacy now." But at least in terms of what the world now knows, doesn't this create more of an imperative for diplomatic engagement? The issue in the end is: If the United States wanted to get serious about diplomacy and put a real offer on the table for Iran with security guarantees and all those things, the Europeans would be right there with us, and China and Russia would be right there with us. The problem standing in the way at this point is U.S. policy. This estimate is not going to change that.