Oh My Goodness! Bush Was Lying About Iran?

Condoleezza Rice was lying about Iran? Dick Cheney was lying about Iran? We don’t have to nuke Iran to keep Iran from nuking us? Well my stars and garters! I am shocked! The New York Times this morning says a new report released by the National Intelligence Estimate yesterday means that “for now at least, the main argument for a military conflict with Iran — widely rumored and feared, judging by antiwar protesters that often greet Mr. Bush during his travels — is off the table for the foreseeable future.” The Washington Post says, “President Bush got the world's attention this fall when he warned that a nuclear-armed Iran might lead to World War III. But his stark warning came at least a month or two after he had first been told about fresh indications that Iran had actually halted its nuclear weapons program.” WaPo went on to say, “The new intelligence report released yesterday not only undercut the administration's alarming rhetoric over Iran's nuclear ambitions but could also throttle Bush's effort to ratchet up international sanctions and take off the table the possibility of preemptive military action before the end of his presidency.” Bush’s national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley admitted that he, Vice Prez Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Condi Rice and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates had reviewed and debated the report two weeks ago. Steven Myers writes in the NYT today (“An Assessment Jars a Foreign Policy Debate About Iran”): “It (the report) will certainly weaken international support for tougher sanctions against Iran, as a senior administration official grudgingly acknowledged. And it will raise questions, again, about the integrity of America’s beleaguered intelligence agencies, including whether what are now acknowledged to have been overstatements about Iran’s intentions in a 2005 assessment reflected poor tradecraft or political pressure.” But Hadley countered that view by saying, “the estimate showed that suspicions about Iran’s intentions were warranted, given that it had a weapons program in the first place.” Hadley even said, “On balance, the estimate is good news...on one hand, it confirms that we were right to be worried about Iran seeking to develop nuclear weapons. On the other hand, it tells us that we have made some progress in trying to ensure that that does not happen. But it also tells us that the risk of Iran acquiring a nuclear weapon remains a very serious problem.” Or, to put it another way...there must be a pony here someplace, look at all the horseshit. Another article in the NYT (“U.S. Finds Iran Halted Its Nuclear Arms Effort in 2003”) says, “The report states that the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research judges that Iran is unlikely to achieve this goal before 2013, because of ‘foreseeable technical and programmatic problems’.” As I see it, the only recourse the Bush administration now has is to claim that everyone is lying, Iran is lying and The National Intelligence Estimate report is a lie; trust the Bush people—the only reliable, honest, Christians in the United States--Iran is still a real, ungodly threat to democracy, love, the American way and world peace, and those who don’t want to nuke Iran are traitorous blasphemers who also should be nuked off the face of the earth. And what with all this new info about White House mendacity, does anyone in the Bush administration remember that our soldiers are still getting killed in Iraq for no reason and that the US has been bankrupted by that illegal, unnecessary war? As of today, 3,882 American soldiers have died in that George W. Bush/Dick Cheney war.