The N.I.E. Mystery-Riddle-Enigma

Yesterday's news about Iran's nuclear weapons or, more accurately, lack thereof is an event that recalls Winston Churchill's description of the Soviet Union as a mystery wrapped in a riddle inside an enigma.

Even by Bush Administration standards of incompetence, illogic and intrigue, there is no sane explanation for the President's continuing public insistence that Iran come clean about weapons that his National Security Adviser now admits Bush has known for "months" do not exist.

Unless...

Going back to the 2003 Cheney gang massaging of intelligence about Iraq's WMDs that prompted Colin Powell to mislead the UN, the questions arise (1) Is Stephen Hadley trying to hide the fact that Bush was being similarly duped or (2) Did the desire for another invasion lead Bush and Cheney once again to hide evidence that would destroy the rationale for doing it until the intelligence agencies themselves finally rebelled against doing another George Tenet?

There are other, less likely possibilities. Did Congressional overseers threaten to blow the whistle (they deny it)? Did somebody finally wise up to the fact that the murky exile-terrorist group, Mujahedeen-e-Khalq or MEK, credited with "helping expose Iran’s secret nuclear program,” has been no more reliable than Ahmed Chalabi's grifters were in Iraq?

As conservatives scramble to explain that Iran stopped trying to produce nuclear weapons in 2003 because they were terrified by our invasion of Iraq (the most Hail Mary of passes in a gone game), the maddening opaqueness of what happened this week to derail Bush's milk run to World War III remains a 21st century mystery wrapped in a riddle inside an enigma.

Fourteen months from now, maybe we can give up playing these heart-stopping Neo-Con games and start living again in a sane world.

Hide-and-Seek Republicans

The games go on in the United States Senate.

At a press conference yesterday, John Kerry pleaded with Republican colleagues to come out of hiding and go public with the opposition to the war they have been expressing in private. If they did, he predicted, more than 60 Senators would vote for a change in policy

“This is the time, this is the moment,” Sen. Kerry said at a press conference. Republican Sen. Olympia Snowe agreed. “We are at a crossroads between hope and reality,” she said.

White House marching orders were reflected, as they often are, on the Politico web site: “Republican leaders on Tuesday pounced on a newly released National Intelligence Estimate to argue that the increasingly powerful and ominous Al Qaeda presence justifies current troop levels in Iraq at least until September.”

Never mind that the Estimate was an exercise in vagueness, that it is the presence of American troops that brought Saudi suicide bombers to Iraq and that we are losing the hide-and-seek game of trying to uproot their increasing numbers. This White House uses the “kill your parents and ask for mercy because you’re an orphan” strategy without blinking.

It’s painful to see people sworn to serve the national interest keep playing political games with the lives of Americans in uniform.