Bush's Nuclear-Boogeyman Scam

| Bernard Weiner |

So, let me see if I've got this straight:

The Cheneyists wanted to bomb Iran based on the same fear-scam Americans fell for when CheneyBush were pushing the invasion of Iraq: nuclear weapons. Here's how their scheme fell apart -- or did it?

In 2002-2003, you may recall, Rice and Bush and Cheney kept hyping Saddam Hussein's alleged robust nuclear-weapons program -- all that "yellowcake" uranium supposedly obtained from Africa and so on -- and warning about "mushroom clouds" over major American cities.

This time, in 2007, the Cheneyists were frothing at the mouth almost daily about the need to attack because the Iranians were just about to achieve atomic critical-mass and it wouldn't be long before they'd be able to launch nuclear-tipped missiles at our allies in Europe, at our troops in Iraq, and at Israel in the Middle East. Iran had to be stopped at once.

But (and it's a very big "but"), it appears that there was a kind of rebellion in the upper reaches of the Bush Administration to prevent the neocons -- led by Cheney, Bush, Addington, Bolton, et al. -- from rushing headlong into a disastrous use of the military option.

THE TUG-OF-WAR WITHIN

Virtually everyone in the Bush Administration believes that Iran's regional ambitions need to be blunted. The battle is between the "ideologues" and the "realists," the latter being those who think that in light of the intelligence community's NIE findings that Iran's nuclear-weapons program was abandoned in 2003 and would take maybe a decade to reconstitute to the point of danger, one has time to develop a strong diplomatic-cum-sanctions policy, with no need for immediate military action.

No doubt, the key players and factions in that rebellion will be revealed shortly. I'll offer my reasonable guesses, for what they're worth: the Joint Chiefs of Staff and many of the senior analysts at the CIA.

As for the timing, some of those career intelligence analysts were ready to disclose the http://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2007/12/the-senate-and.html">NIE's classified contents in public unless the finding were released; these CIA analysts were prepared to face prosecution, if necessary.

I suspect that Defense Secretary Gates fell into this "realist" camp as well. And, who knows?, maybe even Condi Rice, along with a good many key Republican leaders in Congress, who realized how difficult it would be to save their jobs in the '08 election if Bush launched yet another war in the Greater Middle East.

SHORT ON BULLETS & BODIES

The Joint Chiefs, more than anyone else in the Bush Administration, know how thin their forces are stretched to service the Administration's imperial war aims; and in order to fill their quotas for warm bodies in uniform, they have to: lower the physical and moral standards for recruits (taking in criminals, gang members, those physically and maybe even mentally unfit for service); use various lies and scams to lure young prospects to join the military; keep sending those soldiers already serving in Iraq and Afghanistan back again and again for yet another rotation; utilize stop-loss provisions in order to keep their hooks into soldiers whose tours of duty are up and should be going home; etc., etc.

In addition, U.S. military equipment in Iraq is constantly breaking down, or "disappears" once it gets into the field. Just this week, it was revealed that the Pentagon was unable to account for http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/12/06/iraq/main3584247.shtml">yet another billion dollars' worth of military equipment, a good share of which no doubt winds up in the hands of the Iraqi insurgents trying to force the occupying American forces out of their country.

Symbolizing how ridiculously scary the situation is there: law-enforcement agencies inside the U.S. are http://www.huffingtonpost.com/huff-wires/20070817/ammunition-shortage">running out of bullets, because that ammo is needed in Iraq where the troops also are short on bullets.

BUSH'S LUDICROUS RESPONSE

Bush's first, laughable response to the NIE release last week was to claim that he was informed in August of 2007 by National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell that there was unspecified "new information" on Iran, but McConnell "didn't tell me what the information was." We were supposed to believe that Bush never asked "what information?", but simply went back to bike-riding in the White House gym. That was the Maximum Leader's cockamamie story, which didn't pass the smell test by any measure.

Senator Joe Biden, among many others, expressed incredulity and outrage at this obvious lie. Said the Delaware senator: "Are you telling me a president that's briefed every single morning, who's fixated on Iran, is not told back in August that the tentative conclusion of 16 intelligence agencies in the U.S. government said they had abandoned their effort for a nuclear weapon in '03? I refuse to believe that. If that's true, he has the most incompetent staff in modern American history, and he's one of the most incompetent presidents in modern American history."

Without admitting that Bush had lied, the White House hastily "amended" Bush's comment; http://thinkprogress.org/2007/12/06/perino-lie-bush">Press Secretary Dana Perino, admitted that Bush had been told that Iran's nuclear program may have been "suspended." With a straight face, she went on: "I can see where you could see that the president could have been more precise in that language. But the president was being truthful."

THE NEW OPERABLE WORD: "KNOWLEDGE"

How can we be sure that Bush was informed of the actual Iran findings by the intelligence community? Because it was in August that Bush's anti-Iran rhetoric switched. Instead of talking about a nuclear-weapons program and capabilities, he began referring to how dangerous Iran would be if it obtained the "knowledge" of how to make nuclear weapons. A BIG difference.

It took some weeks but several of us political analysts (most notably Josh Marshall at http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/060217.php">Talking Points Memo) began commenting on the ramifications of that difference. In October, http://www.crisispapers.org/essays7w/dime.htm">I wrote: "The former probable casus belli -- coming close to having a nuclear weapon -- has now been replaced by having 'knowledge' of how to build a bomb. Anyone can obtain that 'knowledge' on the internet or by reading scientific papers. Short version: the U.S. will attack."

But few in the mainstream media either noticed or commented on the difference, since the anti-Iran propaganda emanating from Cheney and Bush and Rice was rolled out daily, as a justification for when the U.S. would be "forced" to go to war with Iran, presumably in the Spring of 2008. In other words, even though CheneyBush knew about the NIE findings, they continued to issue statements that were designed to give the impression that nothing had changed and that Iran's nuclear-weapons program was on track and was scarily close to being operational -- Bush even used the term "World War III". (For a great chronological summary of how this all unfolded, see the Washington Post's Dan Froomkin's "http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/blog/2007/12/05/BL2007120501703_5.html">A Pattern of Deception.").

As the Bush Administration moved closer and closer to pulling the trigger on an Iran attack, something had to be done by those forces inside the government who opposed the Iran misadventure. Hence, the forcing of the release of the NIE.

SY HERSH'S 2006 REPORTING

We now know that Cheney and his neo-con forces inside the Administration had prevented the NIE from surfacing for a long time. Pulitizer Prize-winning reporter Seymour Hersh told Wolf Blitzer on CNN that Cheney had "kept his foot on the neck of that report" for more than a year.

Much of the early history of this attack-Iran plan was reported brilliantly by Hersh in The New Yorker. Here are the money quotes from a http://rawstory.com/news/2007/CNN_Seymour_Hersh_vindicated_by_new_1205.html">Raw Story chronology:


And kept it was, under Cheney's heel, until last week, when the White House released the NIE, presumably because they feared the New York Times was about to run the story, maybe one leaked by those angry CIA analysts.

The White House took a big P.R. hit with the release of the NIE, since their rationale for an imminent military attack on Iran went out the window, but, in true Rovian fashion, Bush and Cheney and Hadley and their neo-con echo chamber in the rightwing media proceeded as if the NIE never was issued and continued to urge the world to come down hard on the secretive Iranians for not "coming clean" about their nuclear program. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.

TRYING TO PROVOKE IRAN

The conventional wisdom inside the Beltway is that the Administration now no longer can feel free to launch an attack on Iran. But CheneyBush for the past seven years have demonstrated time and time again that they want what they want and that they will move to get what they want despite what anybody else thinks or does.

What they want before they leave office is to wipe out Iran's weapons capabilities, nuclear and conventional, at the very least setting back that country's geopolitical ambitions in the Greater Middle East for at least a decade or two. During this hiatus, presumably Iraq and other regional countries can be built up as buffers against Iranian influence.

While it's true that Iran may have dodged an imminent bullet as a result of the NIE findings, CheneyBush are desperately looking for some way to justify an attack on Iran -- or, if they don't initiate it themselves, will support a massive air attack by their regional ally Israel.

CheneyBush's operational tactic at the moment is to try to get American citizens enraged at the Iranians for smuggling explosives in large quantities into Iraq (which may or may not be true), which wind up killing U.S. troops. If that doesn't work, CheneyBush will try to provoke Iran into some provocative overt act that would require a robust military response by the U.S.

In short, friends, the final year of CheneyBush in power, unless they are impeached and removed soon, is going to be filled with even more such reckless, dangerous initiatives abroad, and continued degradation of our democracy and Constitution at home. Fasten your seatbelts; we're all in for a helleva bumpy 2008.

-- BW

but when it comes to the mind of the average American?

Knowledge is a funny thing, and the thing is, everyone keeps talking about the "knowledge" as if it was a secret. Thousands, maybe tens of thousands of people have the "knowledge" of how to build a nuclear bomb. If you really wanted to, you, with the right amount of money and research could obtain that knowledge. Do you expect me to believe that Iran has no knowledge of how to do this? Other then that I agree with the article.

In April 2006, former "just one of the boys" Negroponte says "Iran ain't workin' on no nukes. That is the US intelligence community's best estimate." The White House, Congress (which is under Republican control at the time) and all their pals in the corporate media launch a "Let's Lynch Negroponte and the US Intelligence Community" campaign that includes such timeless classics as "The CIA got burned on the Iraq War Pre-Intelligence so now they would rather see us go up in a mushroom cloud than look stoopid again" and "Define evidence".

This continues for a year until Negroponte is hounded out of his job and replaced by McConnell who bitches and moans that he can't fire the people who worked for Negroponte.

About the same time, the CIA loses Goss and gets Hayden. And the US Intelligence community starts trying to release the NIE about Iran, but Cheney tells them "Go fuck yourself" in his best go fuck yourself style. Meanwhile, members of the press are reporting every bit of bad news that they can scrounge up about the CIA. Never mind that Hayden has vowed to make this a new, more open, more honest Central Intelligence Agency. They even make up stuff the CIA didn't do. This is to paint the CIA as so corrupt that the public will not believe anything it says.

The CIA, worrying that the White House will step up the smears against the agency once the NIE is released in order to discredit the document and its findings, decides to pre-emptively release the old list of its illegal activities that was drawn up in the wake of Watergate, known as The Family Jewels This is greeted by the press with yawns for the most part in the summer of 2007. Everyone knows about all this old history.

In August, 2007, Bush is told in no uncertain terms that Iran is not working on any nukes. He and Cheney start changing their mushroom cloud stories so that they are more technically "true" while still banging the drums to war with Iran and still refusing to allow the NIE to be released.

The US intelligence community finally threatens to leak the NIE, at which point the White House has to allow it to be released.

There is much joy in the United States.

Three days later, unnamed sources tell a New York Times reporter who has been a fierce critic of the CIA and of the US Intelligence Community's decision making ability regarding Iran for the past year and a half(but who believes every word that Israel's intelligence says about Syrian nukes) that two years ago, under the previous CIA head, two torture tapes were destroyed.

That very weekend, both the Washington Post and the New York Times run nearly identical editorials in which they speculate that the CIA "low balled" in its estimation of Iran's nuclear ambitions in order to avoid making the mistakes which they made before the Iraq War. They cite as proof the fact that the agency destroyed two tapes two years ago, which proves that the US intelligence community is fixated with its reputation above all else, including national security.

:nuke: