The Blog House: New intelligence addles designs on war with Iran

Editor's note: Starting today, The Blog House becomes a Thursday fixture of Opinion Exchange. It previously was published on Saturdays.

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That's the problem with World War III: You hype it and hype it, but it always fails to live up to expectations.

At least that seems to be the case with the Iranian nuclear program. This week's National Intelligence Estimate revealed that Iran actually halted its nuclear weapon program four years ago. And just when we were about to get the presidential warning that "we cannot wait for the final proof -- the smoking gun -- that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud" so we could bomb the bejesus out of Iran.

Erza Klein at Tapped (1) realized the magnitude of the news. "It's HUGE. As of tomorrow morning, there is no politician in America, no media figure, no staffer, who can credibly say that they didn't 'know' that Iran's nuclear program was much less significant than had been reported. ... So they halted their program in 2003, most likely have not restarted it, and in any case, are almost a decade away from creating a nuclear weapon."

Many bloggers saw the news as the end to the possibility of any war with Iran. "See those round things bouncing off into the distance? That would be the wheels coming off the Bush Administration's attempt to bounce 1000lb bombs off the top of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's head," wrote Lucyp at Falling on a Bruise (2). "... The gnashing of teeth in the Bush and Cheney house must have been deafening as their efforts to convince the World that Iran was on the brink of unleashing nuclear Armageddon on us all fell flatter than a sumo wrestler's armchair cushion."

But conservative bloggers weren't quite as quick to buy into the NIE. According to Judah at Headline Junky (3), "It's important not to overlook, though, the fact that Iran's entire nuclear program is the result of a decades-long clandestine procurement effort that was in direct violation of their legal obligations under the [Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty], that at no time since the program was revealed has Iran ever been in full compliance with its obligations under the NPT, and that they have repeatedly backtracked on promised concessions both to the IAEA and EU."

Norman Podhoretz, one of the architects of the war in Iraq and a Rudy Giuliani adviser, wrote at Commentary (4) that he suspected a corrupt intelligence community was at work. "[T]he intelligence community, having been excoriated for supporting the then universal belief that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, is now bending over backward to counter what has up to now been a similarly universal view ... that Iran is hell-bent on developing nuclear weapons. ... But I entertain an even darker suspicion. It is that the intelligence community, which has for some years now been leaking material calculated to undermine George W. Bush, is doing it again."

Bush held a news conference on Wednesday to explain that he had been told of the NIE's findings only the week prior. Josh Marshall (5) found that explanation hard to swallow. "The essence of what President Bush was saying was that whatever chatter he may have heard last summer, he didn't hear the key details until this week. If you take at face value what the president is saying, his spy chief, Mike McConnell, comes in to the president and says, 'Mr. President, we've got some important new information on the Iran nuclear front.' And the president apparently says, okay. And then he doesn't ask him what the information was. 'He didn't tell me what the information was.' ...[I]s this really the president's answer? He didn't think to ask what the new information was?"

Until next Nov. 4, every major event will be viewed through a political prism. So which party was helped by this news? Depends on whom you asked.

"The latest news from Iran ... presents somewhat of a dilemma for liberal Democrats," according to Victor Davis Hanson at the Corner (6). "Are they now to suggest that Republicans have been warmongering over a nonexistent threat for partisan purposes? But to advance that belief is also to concede that Iran, like Libya, likely came to a conjecture (around say early spring 2003?) that it was not wise for regimes to conceal WMD programs, given the unpredictable, but lethal American military reaction."

"[I]t ... obliterates what the entire Republican presidential field has been saying about Iran for the past year," said Joe Klein at Swampland (7). "And, with Iraq quieting, it means that the election is more likely to focus on domestic concerns, which favor Democrats -- that is, as long as the real Al Qaeda, the threat that Bush has been studiously ignoring, remains quiet."

Obama campaigns with the queen ...

... of daytime television, that is. Oprah Winfrey will campaign this weekend for the Democratic candidate in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina. He gets her star power, and, if he wins, he has to call his term "Oprah Winfrey Presents the Obama Presidency."

tobrien@startribune.com

HOW TO FIND THE BLOGS
1 Tapped • prospect.org/csnc/blogs/tapped
2 Falling on a Bruise • bruisefalling.blogspot.com
3 Headline Junky • headlinejunky.com
4 Commentary • commentarymagazine.com/blogs
5 Josh Marshall • talkingpointsmemo.com
6 The Corner • corner.nationalreview.com
7 Swampland • time-blog.com/swampland