Straight Out of Left Field

[UPDATED]
A bombshell of sorts was dropped earlier today by the intelligence community in Washington. Despite what you may have been led to believe, it turns out that the country's sixteen intelligence agencies have determined that Iran shelved its nuclear weapons program in 2003. I know, that contradicts everything I've heard from the Bush administration, too.

The whole situation is weird. This intelligence estimate has been around for awhile, and Dick Cheney has apparently been trying to shift it more over to his point of view, i.e. that an Iranian nuclear bomb is an imminent danger to our very way of life. Now that we see the strength with which the intelligence community is holding on to its view, I'm not sure how Cheney could've nudged it toward his side--he'd have had to obliterate it. Kevin Drum waded into the morass of motivations for the release of this material, and he didn't come up with much. Cheney certainly didn't want this released in this form (or at all, most likely), and it's commonly assumed that he sways the Prez. In a different post, Drum linked to a CNN report in which Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell promised that he was not going to release the estimate. And yet, golly, here it is. What changed? Drum speculated that Congress pressured to get this out, but--have you seen Congress lately?--that seems somewhat unlikely. Spencer Ackerman at TPMmuckraker came up with some actual statements from actual Democratic Senate staffers that this wasn't the case. Then how did this get past the vice president's office?

Regardless of who was behind the intelligence release, though, there's another point. This has been floating around intelligence circles for a year or more. The Prez and his crew have been aware of this the entire time they've been sabre-rattling against the Iranians. No, it's hardly surprising that they'd do such a thing, but this reminds us again that our own government is entirely unreliable when it comes to foreign policy statements or decisions. They were going to (and they still might, so don't get too comfortable) take us into a war with an unthreatening (but extremely hated) sovereign power. The actual facts of the situation were something to be overcome, not something to be respected. We've still got almost fourteen months left with these guys in office. What else that has no relation to reality are they plotting?

UPDATE--I noticed this last night, but I hit "Publish" before I mentioned it. The link on The Washington Post's home page to their analysis of the situation reads: "Report a Potential Blow To Bush's Tehran Policy." Ya think? If you actually click through this morning, though, you'll see the much stronger headline: "A Blow to Bush's Tehran Policy." I'm glad they made up their minds.