Question for Shrub: What Did You Know and When Did You Know It?
This post is from Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo.
Since the release of the new Iran NIE on Monday, we’ve been debating just when the president and his key advisors know the basic gist of what the new report would show. Take them at their own word and they really didn’t know anything until just this last week. As soon as they knew, we knew, they would say.
Sure Mike McConnell mentioned something to the president back in August. But he had no way of knowing that this “new information” would dramatically undermine the claim that Iran was on the brink of going nuclear. And as the president said yesterday, “He didn’t tell me what the information was.”
Yet I’m hearing from a lot of directions that the basic gist of the report — that the Iranians aren’t nearly as close to going nuclear as we’d been led to believe — has been circulating at least in intelligence circles for some time. In other words, this NIE has been sitting either literally or figuratively on the president’s desk for months.
Now, along those lines look at this September 22nd post from a site called Swoop, which I hear is put together by some pretty knowledgeable DC insiders.
In our last key judgment on Iran, we noted that the main driver of possible military action has switched from Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program to Iranian activities in Iraq. This conclusion is hardening. Intelligence Community (IC) sources tell us that a new National Intelligence Estimate about Iran is near completion. This concludes that Iran remains many years – as much as 10 – away from a weapon. Thus, the WMD argument will not gain traction from the IC. Iraq, however, is a different story. Pentagon officials have told us that the stress on the Iranian threat to Iraqi stability in the Petraeus and Crocker testimony is entirely deliberate. These officials say that the Sunni elements with whom the US military has been cutting deals in Anbar province are violently “anti-Persian” and have convinced US commanders to see Iranian meddling as the source of destabilization. With Anbar representing the one clear success of the “surge”, the US military is highly motivated to protect it against the perceived Iranian threat. This was the source of Petraeus’ allegation that Iran is trying to build a “Hezbollah-like” anti-US militia in Iraq. A new US base is under construction near the Iranian border and checkpoints are being erected along roads leading from Iran. For immediate purposes, this does not change our assessment that military force against Iran remains unlikely in the short-term. But it does add a new source of tension alongside the WMD factor.
Just one blog post, definitely. But the key point is right there: word was out that the NIE deliver the goods for the Iranian bomb enthusiasts, that the “WMD argument” for war would not “gain traction from the IC (i.e., Intelligence Community).”
What it all comes down to is what the president says he didn’t know about until the beginning of December was already being chatted about on insider national security blogs back in September. Does anybody still believe he hasn’t known this for months?