Credibility Posted by Ilan Goldenberg

If you had asked me a week ago, do you think it is possible for the Bush Administration to further discredit the United States in the international community?  Is it possible to make our allies trust us even less on the issue of proliferation?  I would have had a hard time figuring out how the Administration could possibly do that.

Well, it turns out that it can.  While the NIE really is fantastic news, it just reinforces our lack of credibility on this issue.  And the issue is not some minor issue.  The issue is the proliferation of nuclear weapons.  THE SINGLE GREATEST THREAT to the security of the United States and the world.  And we have absolutely no credibility on it.  That is just not good, and I'm not sure it just changes the day we have a new administration.  I fear the damage to American credibility is more permanent than that.

Update:  In his press conference the President essentially said that they the intel community had new information in the summer and were in the process of verifying.  Should they perhaps have held off on a major major step like declaring the IRGC a terrorist organization, until after this information had been vetted and verified? 

He also seemed to say that he didn't know about this until last week.  To me that just seems like a huge stretch. 

Comments

[md]

What's even more striking is that, although the president said McConnell and others in the IC came to him with new information, by his own admissions he seems not to have asked: "Well, what is it?"

[Dan Kervick]

This NIE release, along with the release a few weeks ago of Iranian prisoners and the declaration by theater military commanders that Iran had halted some of its activities in Iraq, and also recent constructive comments from Gates lead me to think that a good part of the executive branch has turned very decisively against the Cheney wing of the administration (which apparently now includes Petraeus), and is working hard to undermine the propaganda campaign against Iran and ratchet down the confrontation. That's comforting, because in the past I tended to be skeptical of these supposed administration splits, wondering whether it was just an elaborate good cop, bad com routine. But I now think it is very real.

[Zathras]

I think this conclusion is correct, and it's a remarkable thing given the deference traditionally shown by the agencies engaged in national security activities to any President who insists on it.

This deference is based on the legitimacy of elected authority in our system, but also on the assumption that the President's own judgment will not be exercised in complete disregard of the best information or expert opinion. This is an assumption that has to have been badly shaken by events over the last few years, which places civilian and especially uniformed officials in a terrible position. They are not accustomed by experience or training to having a choice between defying the President and jeopardizing important American interests; neither, of course, are they accustomed to a chain of command that sometimes runs through the office of the Vice President and sometimes doesn't.

In any event, it is hard for me to recall the last time a public finding by a group of government agencies cut so directly across the public statements made by the President on a subject as important as nuclear proliferation and Iran. In the short run, it makes the President look ridiculous; so too do statements attributed to Sec. Gates and Admiral Fallon about the prospect of war with Iran, which Bush and Cheney have so ostentatiously and repeatedly refused to rule out. An awful lot of people within the executive branch had to be convinced that President Bush and his Vice President were badly off the rails for this kind of dissent to be manifested so openly.

[Don Bacon]

The executive branch, not surprisingly, is convinced that it is 'on the rails'. Stephen Hadley: "On one hand it [NIE] confirms that we were right to be worried about Iran seeking to develop nuclear weapons. On the other hand, it tells us that we have made some progress in trying to insure that that does not happen. But it also tells us that the risk of Iran acquiring a nuclear weapon remains a very serious problem."

As examine this situation logically, as we should, we ought to remember that the preemptive war on Iraq was a US anomaly. Usually its major wars have started with a provocation, real or feigned, like the Maine, Pearl Harbor, Korean and Kuwait invasions, Tonkin Gulf and 9/11. For one thing, the Persian Gulf is currently a tinderbox where anything might happen, and there could be a desire for war in some Iranian quarters like there is with the US neocons.

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