Video: John Bolton debunks the NIE, suggests that long-time Bush critics politicized it |
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Written by Hotair | |
Wednesday, 05 December 2007 | |
![]() John Bolton posted at 1:14 pm on December 5, 2007 by Bryan If you’d like to have your confidence in the CIA and in National Estimates in particular shattered, go read this:
If that’s indicative of the quality that goes into the NIE year in and year out, the average blog is more accurate and relevant than the National Intelligence Estimate. That ought to be a scandal. As the former Under Secretary for Arms Control and past US Ambassador to the UN, John Bolton is in a position to know much of the back story behind the National Intelligence Estimate that was released this week. Perhaps not surprisingly, Bolton is as skeptical of the NIE as Israel’s Dan Gillerman is.
John Bolton on Fox
Bolton drops a hint at the politics built into the NIE when he notes that he knows who was behind the change in tone from 2005’s NIE, which alleged an ongoing Iranian nuclear weapons program, with this year’s, which alleges that the Iranians shut their nuclear weapons program down in 2003. In the clip, Bolton doesn’t name the people he suspects of politicizing the NIE to suit their own agendas. Kenneth Timmerman does.
In his book (which I highly recommend), Bolton does call out Brill for attempting to weaken Iran-related IAEA work in June 2003 and Brill comes across in the book as insubordinate and driven by his own agendas, whatever they were, rather than acting on the clear instructions from his superiors in the administration including Bolton and then National Security Advisor Rice. This isn’t a smoking gun that Brill is guilty, but does demonstrate at least to me that there’s an established pattern on the part of one of the named figures that have turned up in association with the NIE. My working take on this is that, first, anything that has the Iranians crowing about a victory over us is either being greatly misunderstood or mischaracterized or it’s very problematic for us. Second, I’d like to know why this NIE is more believable than the one that it contradicts from two years ago. That’s not snark; it just reflects the fact that we don’t know the underlying facts that have driven this reversal. Those facts weren’t released, while the open source facts (some of which turned up in the NIE itself) still point to a weapons program. The Washington Post hints at it, but doesn’t deliver enough to reassure.
Betrayed here is the fact that we still don’t know enough to know what we don’t know about Iran’s intentions. It’s the old unknown unknowns problem. We know they’re enriching uranium because they say they are. If they’re not doing that to build a weapon, then what is the purpose? I also share Jonah Goldberg’s distaste for putting the intelligence process of reform above the actual results that our intelligence community produces. This tendency to put process and consensus ahead of results has been a problem across the board in the US government for quite a few years now. We’re at war, and Iran is a dangerous player in the wider war. We need reliable data, not glad happys and grins that, gee, we may not be right about anything but by golly, we all had a good group hug after the meeting. Speculating a bit, if it’s true that Iran shelved its nuclear weapons program in 2003 (and I’m by no means convinced that it did), they would obviously have done so in response to US action in Iraq and Afghanistan plus US-led diplomatic moves afterward. Coupled with the recent detente with North Korea, it’s possible (though again, I’m far from convinced on this, and I’m also far from convinced that North Korea’s turn is going to hold) that Bush administration policies have succeeded in taming two of the most notoriously hostile countries on the planet. If that turns out to be the case, the historic assessment of the Bush presidency will be much more positive than its present approval rating suggests is even possible. http://hotair.com/archives/2007/12/05/video-john-bolton-debunks-the-nie-suggests-that-long-time-bush-critics-politicized-it/
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Last Updated ( Wednesday, 05 December 2007 ) |
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