Monday, December 10, 2007

Going deeper into President Bush's handling of the NIE by Lawrence Auster

I have suggested in previous entries that President Bush allowed the National Intelligence Estimate on the Iranian nuclear program to be published because he had given up on doing anything about Iran, and the NIE gave him an "out." An even more unattractive possibility, raised by Caroline Glick in a devastating column last week, is that Bush, as part of a pro-Muslim tilt of which the Annapolis conference was also a part, had been planning all along to let go of the Iran nuclear issue and leave Israel twisting in the wind.

In a blog entry posted December 5 at Commentary's blog, Contentions, Norman Podhoretz has a more honorable--and, up to a point, more plausible--explanation for the president's behavior. Podhoretz says that Bush permitted the NIE to be published simply because its intelligence that Iran had stopped enriching uranium for military purposes in 2003 was solid, and therefore he couldn't suppress the report.

Podhoretz also points out that notwithstanding the findings of the NIE, Bush in his press conference last week tried hard to keep open the option of a military strike against Iran.

Yet Podhoretz further adds, with sadness, that the political reality created by the NIE is that the military option is now practically closed.

However, Podhoretz also states that Israeli intelligence believes that Iran resumed uranium enrichment in 2005.

Full Article ...

Sphere: Related Content

No comments: