WP, Dan Froomkin: Bush's "neck-snapping spin" on Iran ("Same here.")

Neck-Snapping Spin From the President
By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Tuesday, December 4, 2007

By concluding that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program four years ago, the national intelligence estimate released yesterday undermined a key element of President Bush's foreign policy. It raised questions about whether the president and vice president knowingly misled the public about the danger posed by Iran. And it added to Bush's profound credibility problems with the American people and the international community. But to hear Bush talk about it at the White House press conference this morning, the new NIE vindicated his beliefs and makes his warnings about Iran more potent.

It was neck-snapping spin even by Bush standards. He intentionally misread the report's central point, failed to acknowledge a huge change in his argument for why Iran is dangerous and exhibited pure bullheaded stubbornness....

Yesterday's report came as something as a shock to the general public. Bush and Vice President Cheney have long asserted that Iran was actively seeking nuclear weapons, and Cheney, in particular, had been accelerating what some observers saw as a drumbeat for war. But the nation's 16 intelligence agencies didn't come to their conclusion overnight. In fact, this NIE had been in the works for 18 months, during which some of its authors were reportedly harried by Cheney for not being sufficiently hawkish.

So what did Bush know and when did he know it? Bush insisted today that he had not been formally briefed on the NIE until last week, and that his director of national intelligence simply told him in August that there was some new information. "He didn't tell me what the information was," Bush said. "He did tell me it was going to take a while to analyze."...

***

The apparent change in Bush's red line for Iran -- no longer the possession or even the pursuit of nuclear weapons but the knowledge of how to make them -- is highly reminiscent of the linguistic contortions Bush executed after it was established that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction....Bush's new mantra is: "Iran was dangerous, Iran is dangerous, and Iran will be dangerous if they have the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon." But one of the most telling moments of the press conference came when Bush entirely ducked a question posed by New York Times reporter Steven Lee Myers: "The Non-Proliferation treaty doesn't prohibit a country like Iran from having the knowledge to enrich uranium. Are you setting a different standard, in this case, and a different international obligation on Iran? And is that going to complicate the efforts to keep the pressure on when it comes to sanctions at the United Nations?"

In his meandering non-response Bush insisted that "the Iranian people must understand that the tone and actions of their government are that which is isolating them."

Same here....

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/blog/2007/12/04/BL2007120401026.html?nav%3Dhcmodule&sub=AR

"The Non-Proliferation treaty doesn't prohibit a country like Iran from having the knowledge to enrich uranium. Are you setting a different standard, in this case, and a different international obligation on Iran? And is that going to complicate the efforts to keep the pressure on when it comes to sanctions at the United Nations?"

Bet he wishes Gannon was back in the press corp.

:kick: