http://www.counterpunch.org/ Tragedy of the Ridiculous White House The Coup
Against Bush and Cheney
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
The one thing a president cannot afford to be is ridiculous. This week George
Bush lurched into that fatal category and into the true twilight of his
presidency, festooned with all the traditional discomfitures. Senior aides and
close advisors parley with literary agents and find compelling reason to quit
the White House and spend more time with their families. In public even the
First Lady seems to edge away from her stricken mate.
The latest, fatal instrument of Bushs public humiliation is the National
Intelligence Estimate proclaiming in its unclassified version that Iran stopped
trying to build a nuclear weapon in 2003, thus deliberately, with humiliating
clarity contradicting Bush and Cheneys unending invocation of the Iranian
nuclear threat. For months the blathersphere has quivered with predictions of a
coup here in the US coinciding with an attack on Iran. The bit they got wrong
was that their supposed perps turned out to be on the receiving end and the
coup was aimed at preventing such an attack.
Now, in theory an NIE represents the objective consensus of 16 US
intelligence agencies on matters of national security. In practice it is a
useful guide to how a bunch of bureaucratic knife-fighters assess the balance
of forces in Washington.
In 2002 Bush and Cheney were strong enough to ram their dire assessments of
Iraqs WMDs into the infamous October, 2002 NIE that began with the assertion
that We judge that Iraq has continued its weapons of mass destruction (WMD)
programs
if left unchecked, it probably will have a nuclear weapon during
this decade. The 2002 NIE gave this prediction a high confidence rating,
while appending a dissent from the State Departments Intelligence Bureau.
The cover story for the recently released NIE on Iran, with its u-turn on
previous assessments, is that new information suddenly became available. In
practice this means that in the late summer senior intelligence officials
figured the consensus in Washington and Wall Street Iran against an attack on
Iran was powerful enough for them to lower the boom on the neo-cons. The latter
have now retreated in disarray to their bunkers at the Weekly Standard and the
National Review for a last stand, bellowing that its a filthy plot by
peaceniks in the State Department. Actually, it is, in part, exactly that. It
strikes at the neo-cons and it strikes at Israel, which has staked much on
firing the US to attack Iran.
Its no secret, snarled the National Review that careerists at the CIA and
State have been less interested in implementing the presidents policies on
Iran, Iraq, and North Korea than in sabotaging them at every opportunity.
The Wall Street Journals nutty editorial page went further, fingering
hyper-partisan anti-Bush officials including Tom Fingar, formerly of the
State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research as drafters of the
treacherous NIE.
Humiliated by the NIE which flatly contradicted all his recent claims about
Irans rush for nuclear weapons, Bush flailed away in his Tuesday press
conference, eliciting contempt as he claimed hed only just become aware of the
NIE. If thats true, Senator Joe Biden declared, he has the most
incompetent staff in modern American history and hes one of the most
incompetent presidents in modern American history.
Only the former CIA spook, Bob Baer model for George Clooney Jrs CIA role
in the film Syriana -- tried to give Bush a better role than mere dupe and fall
guy, claiming that Bush himself had pushed for the NIE to go public. Motive? To
head off an attack on Iran, which would undercut any American successes in
Iraq. One can imagine one of Americas more Macchiavelian presidents doing
this, like FDR or LBJ, but Bush?
The only ray of comfort for the president was that Hillary Clinton chose the
start of the week to make herself equally ridiculous, if not more so. As she
slipped behind Barrack Obama in the polls in Iowa, her campaign issued a press
release on December 3 designed to paint Obama as a man consumed by ruthless,
lifelong ambition: In kindergarten, Senator Obama wrote an essay titled 'I
Want to Become President. "Iis Darmawan, 63, Senator Obama's kindergarten
teacher, remembers him as an exceptionally tall and curly haired child who
quickly picked up the local language and had sharp math skills. He wrote an
essay titled, 'I Want To Become President,' the teacher said."
In kindergarten! As the Clinton campaign might say, echoing St Ignatius of
Loyola, Give me the child until he is seven, and well do a good smear job on
him.
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