Monday, December 3, gave us the release of the long-delayed National Intelligence Estimate on Iran – all sixteen intelligence agencies agreeing “with high confidence” that Iran had just bagged their nuclear weapon program in 2003, and that was that. They weren’t working on a bomb – sorry.
The reaction was something like stunned scrambling – if you can imagine that. Everyone knew that war with Iran was coming. The polls were showing it was getting to be much like the run up to the Iraq war – steadily rising public sentiment that something must be done, something like “taking them out.” It was a generalized mild but growing dread – the PR was working.
On the other hand, as Fred Kaplan carefully notes, something else was happening. The show-and-tells in Iraq – those press events where we saw the “evidence” that all the weapons that were killing our troops really came from Iraq – disappeared, and then we were told Iran seemed to be meddling less and less. There was a report that more than sixty percent of the “foreign insurgents” in Iraq actually came from Saudi Arabia and Libya – a minor detail, but part of something larger. One track of the two-track effort to start the third war in the region – (1) they’ll soon have the bomb and (2) they’re killing our boys now – was being closed down for some reason.
The signs were there. Juan Cole saw them. Admiral William Fallon, head of Centcom, and Admiral Michael Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were up to something. Cole offers a quote from Fallon supposedly made to a friend at the time Fallon was up for Senate approval to head Centcom –
A source who met privately with Fallon around the time of his confirmation hearing and who insists on anonymity quoted Fallon as saying that an attack on Iran “will not happen on my watch”. Asked how he could be sure, the source says, Fallon replied, “You know what choices I have. I’m a professional.” Fallon said that he was not alone, according to the source, adding, “There are several of us trying to put the crazies back in the box.”
Then there was General Petraeus, reporting on the surge. Yes, he saw it as his job to say what the president wanted was working just fine, no matter how dodgy his statistics, but he couldn’t cover up the obvious – our efforts had calmed things down, but to no particular end. We had provided space, breathing room, whatever, for all sides to sit down and work things out. No one there had the slightest intention to do that. It was, really, a pointless success. But the little-noted odd moment was when Senator Lieberman asked Petraeus if he would like Congress to provide him with the authority and the resources to go after those nasty Iranians in a cross-border series of major operations. Yes, that would be a bit like Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia when thing weren’t going well, but this time it would be approved. Petraeus said no thank you – he had enough to do as it was. It was odd. You can watch that here. Most people focused on Lieberman, wondering how far up Bush’s ass he was willing to crawl, but the real story was General Petraeus. Why didn’t he take the bait, if, as the far left was saying at the time, he was intent to being Bush’s made-man, or Cheney’s? It didn’t fit.
No one at the time thought that this was part of a minor military coup d’état. But then there was the release of the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran – there might well have been a concerted effort, somewhat subtle, to put the crazies back in the box, and the NIE was when it became public. As Kaplan says – on Iran, the leaders of the State Department, the Defense Department, the military command, and now the intelligence community are on public record. Get back in the box!
Of course the president then said nothing had changed - the findings were a big surprise to him, as he only just found out. But Iran was still dangerous – they could start up the bomb program they had abandoned of over four years ago, in the blink of an eye. And within forty-eight hours he was demanding that Iran “come clean” – they had to reveal all, or all the nations of the world would have to do something. Russia and China shrugged, and the Europeans had only agreed on harsh sanctions to keep the United States from doing something even more foolish. He was whistling in the wind. He was in no position to make demands, coupled with threats. He had been neutered.
Then it got complicated –
A new intelligence estimate released on Monday said Iran had stopped its nuclear weapons program in the fall of 2003, raising questions about whether the president was aware of that when he increased his rhetoric against Tehran.
Bush for months has called Iran a threat and in October raised the specter of World War Three if it acquired a nuclear weapon.
Some Democrats seized on this week’s intelligence report to suggest Bush took an aggressive stance against Iran even though he knew that U.S. intelligence had a different picture of the threat posed by Tehran.
So he was lying to everyone about the threat, and moving us toward a third war, or, as he claimed, he just didn’t know, and didn’t ask. Neither is very comforting, and Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo has a few things to say about that, about when the president and his key advisors knew the basic gist of what the new report would show. As he says, take them at their own word and they really didn’t know anything until just this last week. As soon as they knew, we knew, they would say. But there is a problem with that –
Sure Mike McConnell mentioned something to the president back in August. But he had no way of knowing that this “new information” would dramatically undermine the claim that Iran was on the brink of going nuclear. And as the president said yesterday, “He didn’t tell me what the information was.”
Yet I’m hearing from a lot of directions that the basic gist of the report - that the Iranians aren’t nearly as close to going nuclear as we’d been led to believe– has been circulating at least in intelligence circles for some time. In other words, this NIE has been sitting either literally or figuratively on the president’s desk for months.
To that end Marshall pointed to this September 22nd post from a site called Swoop, knowledgeable DC insiders and intelligence insiders –
In our last key judgment on Iran, we noted that the main driver of possible military action has switched from Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program to Iranian activities in Iraq. This conclusion is hardening. Intelligence Community (IC) sources tell us that a new National Intelligence Estimate about Iran is near completion. This concludes that Iran remains many years – as much as 10 – away from a weapon. Thus, the WMD argument will not gain traction from the IC.
Iraq, however, is a different story. Pentagon officials have told us that the stress on the Iranian threat to Iraqi stability in the Petraeus and Crocker testimony is entirely deliberate. These officials say that the Sunni elements with whom the US military has been cutting deals in Anbar province are violently “anti-Persian” and have convinced US commanders to see Iranian meddling as the source of destabilization. With Anbar representing the one clear success of the “surge”, the US military is highly motivated to protect it against the perceived Iranian threat.
This was the source of Petraeus’ allegation that Iran is trying to build a “Hezbollah-like” anti-US militia in Iraq. A new US base is under construction near the Iranian border and checkpoints are being erected along roads leading from Iran. For immediate purposes, this does not change our assessment that military force against Iran remains unlikely in the short-term. But it does add a new source of tension alongside the WMD factor.
There is a key point – as Marshall says, word was out that the NIE would not deliver the goods for the Iranian bomb enthusiasts, that the “WMD argument” for war would not “gain traction from the IC (i.e., Intelligence Community).” What the president says he didn’t know about until the beginning of December was already being chatted about on insider national security blogs back in September.
So – “Does anybody still believe he hasn’t known this for months?”
That may be nitpicking. It doesn’t matter now.
And anyway, Andrew Sullivan argues the real point is that the system is working –
Maybe this isn’t acknowledged enough, but it seems to me that the Founders would for the first time be pleased with how the United States has been adjusting policy and personnel in wartime this past year. I think when historians look back they will note a few things. The first is that an untrammeled executive branch, high on its own rightness, certain of everything, contemptuous of critics and empowered by understandable public fear … made all the mistakes you’d expect from one-man rule in a permanent “emergency.” The half-assed commitment to Afghanistan, the reckless over-reach with Iraq, the embrace of torture as a primary weapon in the war against Islamic terrorism, the loss of critical allies, the collapse of American moral standing, and then apocalyptic rhetoric over Iran: all this was fueled by a president with no impediments, sealed in an ideological cocoon wound more tightly by his re-election, a victory that reinforced all of his worst instincts in the first term, and lost us two critical years in Iraq.
The Supreme Court made some effort to rein in the president in 2005 and 2006. But the Republican Congress was AWOL, the press cowed, and the government professionals intimidated. All this only really changed in November 2006 with the country sending the opposition party to run the Congress. It was a classic moment of one branch of American government checking the other - saving the other - and correcting course. The Democrats may not have stopped the war, but they helped shift its course. That, in turn, saved the war in Iraq from becoming a complete disaster. Now it’s merely a rescuable disaster.
Is “rescuable” a word? Even if not, you see his point. This is a paean to the balance of powers concept. That sort of thing does matter –
It remains an inconvenient truth that those neocons now hailing the surge’s success would not be able to do so if Americans had taken their advice and voted Republican in 2006. Rumsfeld would still be defense secretary and Cheney’s grip on national policy would remain unshakable.
… Without a vote for the Democrats in 2006, Gates would probably not be at the Pentagon, and Rice would not have been emboldened to shift course on the peace process, and the CIA might not have had the stomach to fight back against Cheney on Iran intelligence. That was the turning point.
The irony is that the 2006 elections, while a Democratic victory, may help salvage something for the Bush administration’s legacy in the Middle East. He needed that.
And there is the larger point –
No single party in our polity can claim credit for all of this. The course adjustment was a function of different entities fighting one another, reacting to events and facts, and thereby forging a more sensible war policy. What no single entity wanted came eventually to pass. It’s shaping up to be a text-book lesson in the virtues of separating powers. Dictatorships cannot do this in wartime, which is why they often lose; neither can unchecked executives in democracies. But it’s a good thing.
The key players will only emerge definitively with the judgment of history. But my roster of those who helped get us back toward a rational war-policy would put Bob Gates and David Petraeus at the top of the list. Mukasey has a chance to do the same kind of thing at Justice. The system, that looked rather fragile for a couple of years, has begun to assert itself again. It works.
Well, maybe, but over at “The Agonist” you’ll find the argument that this was, indeed, “a counter-coup that overthrew the Dick Cheney/neocon cabal that has been running U.S. foreign policy (if not the entire U.S. government).”
That’s not very democratic and all, and contradicts the idealist, Sullivan, but it makes some sense –
This NIE is a flat-out contradiction to everything the President and Vice President have been saying about Iran’s nuclear ambitions (WWIII is on our doorstep if we don’t stop Iran now). The unanimity of opinion, especially coming from the Department of Defense, is especially embarrassing to the White House.
The conclusion many people reach from this development is that it will be nearly impossible for Bush and Cheney to launch air attacks on Iran. But for this to be true, it means that the White House has lost control of the levers of power over the Executive Branch, at least in this important area. George Bush could just order the Department of Defense to commence bombing, but he would not be obeyed.
That may be overstating things, but you need to consider the new situation –
Dick Cheney has lost control over the government and is increasingly isolated in the White House. Without his minions like Paul Wolfowitz, John Bolton, Scooter Libby, David Wurmser, Douglas Feith, and most importantly Donald Rumsfeld, the Vice President has been neutered and put “back in the box.”
And you might as well concede that there never was a Bush administration, only a Cheney administration –
Bush never had loyalists and minions in key cabinet posts; Cheney did. Bush’s loyalists on the White House staff have been resigning steadily, and the only old hand he has around him is Condoleezza Rice, who is in many respects as empty a vessel as Bush himself.
This puts new light on Bush’s frequent assertion that he is “the Decider”. While this seems to mean on the surface that Bush views himself as some sort of dictator, in practice it means that he doesn’t manage his administration, he doesn’t direct anybody or any process, and he isn’t curious about what goes on under him. He sits in the Oval Office waiting for his staff to work up policy issues that require a decision. He insists that these be no more than two pages in length and usually framed as a choice between item A and Item B. Then he decides.
White House power, therefore, rested with the Chief of Staff who controlled access to the President, and with those officials savvy enough to bypass the federal government bureaucracy so that they themselves could frame foreign policy issues and point the President to certain conclusions. Dick Cheney had all these skills, direct access to the President along with a compliant Chief of Staff in Andrew Card, and command of all the key elements of the foreign policy and defense apparatus.
Now things are different –
Dick Cheney’s command structure has been dismantled, and now it appears, notwithstanding his continued ability to influence if not mold George Bush’s thinking, that the federal government has struck back at him and effectively boxed in his ability to tell anyone to do anything. Which means that on the use of unilateral, preemptive military force, President George Bush, never a puppet of Dick Cheney but certainly passive in his presence, has been boxed up as well for the remainder of his term.
Someone, maybe many people, are now saying “Mission Accomplished” – not without truckloads of irony.
Now here’s the even more interesting assertion – forget the two admirals who seemed to have played a role in this “counter-coup.” The key player, or if you like, the head mutineer, or “the force for change,” seems to have been Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, but when you think about it, “directly behind him Old 41 – Poppy Bush.”
Consider it. Gates served for twenty-six years in the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Council, and under the first Bush as Director of Central Intelligence. After leaving the CIA he became president of Texas A&M but served as a member of the Iraq Study Group, the one run by Daddy’s close friend (BFF as they say these days) and family “fixer” James Baker and the avuncular Lee Hamilton. He was the first pick to serve as Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security when it was created, but knew better – he declined the appointment to remain President of Texas A&M. He was an odd choice to replace Rumsfeld, and it was odd that he gave in and accepted the gig.
Daddy intervened? That could be –
If this is true, George H. W. Bush was not so much taking action against his son (Lord knows he’s probably already given up on Dubya ever being an effective president), but against Dick Cheney, America’s first true l’eminence grise in the most sinister meaning of the phrase.
Let’s consider it Old 41’s Christmas gift to the nation.
Well, the elder Bush always wondered about the man he made his own Secretary of Defense. Over the years he just got stranger and stranger. There may be something to this theory.
But then, whatever happened here, things have changed. This was big.
And you thought only third-rate Latin American nations had coups, like in the movies. Perhaps Woody Allen is negotiating film rights with the elder Bush.
