[NYTr] Dems incredulous over Bush's dishonest account of Iran report

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

CNN - Dec 5, 2007
http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/12/04/bush.iran/index.html


Democrats incredulous over Bush's account of Iran report

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Joe Biden on
Tuesday said he can't believe President Bush hasn't known for months
about a recent intelligence estimate that downplays the nuclear threat
from Iran.

Other Democratic candidates also slammed Bush for continuing to
ratchet up the rhetoric against Tehran.

On Tuesday the president acknowledged he had given a speech warning
that Iran's nuclear development risked "World War III" about two months
after his intelligence chief told him a reassessment of Tehran's
nuclear ambitions was under way.

Bush told reporters during a White House news conference that he was
not told the details of the new assessment until last week and he said
the new report, which found that Iran had halted its nuclear weapons
work in 2003, will not change U.S. policy toward Iran.

"Iran was dangerous, Iran is dangerous and Iran will be dangerous if
they have the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon," Bush said,
pointing out that Tehran continues to try to enrich uranium for
civilian purposes and therefore develop technology that could be used
for a weapon.

"They had the program. They halted the program. It's a warning signal
because they could restart it," he said. 

Bush told reporters that he was told of "new information" about Iran in
August during a briefing by Adm. Mike McConnell, the director of
national intelligence.

 "He didn't tell me what the information was. He did tell me it was
going to take a while to analyze," the president said. He said he
wasn't briefed about the new information until the new intelligence
report was prepared last week.

The Democratic presidential candidates were incredulous that Bush did
not know about the assessment's new finding.

Biden, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, called
that explanation "unbelievable."

"Are you telling me a president that's briefed every single morning,
who's fixated on Iran, is not told back in August that the tentative
conclusion of 16 intelligence agencies in the U.S. government said they
had abandoned their effort for a nuclear weapon in '03?" Biden asked in
a conference call with reporters.

"I refuse to believe that," he added. "If that's true, he has the most
incompetent staff in modern American history, and he's one of the most
incompetent presidents in modern American history."

The Bush administration has spent years warning that Iran's development
of nuclear power plants and enriched uranium masked an effort to
produce an atomic bomb. Top officials have called the prospect of a
nuclear-armed Iran "unacceptable."

In an October 17 news conference, Bush said that "If you're interested
in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in
preventing them from having the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear
weapon."

And four days later, Vice President Dick Cheney told a Washington think
tank that Iran would face "serious consequences" from the international
community if it continued to enrich uranium.

But in a report released Monday, U.S. intelligence agencies concluded
that Iran had suspended nuclear weapons work in 2003 and was unlikely
to produce enough weapons-grade uranium for a bomb until at least 2010.

The assessment reverses a 2005 National Intelligence Estimate that
found the Islamic republic was "determined to develop nuclear weapons
despite its international obligations and international pressure."

 The United States and its European allies are pushing for tighter
sanctions against Tehran as a result of that continued refusal, and
Bush said Monday's report "makes it clear that the strategy we have
used in the past is effective."

But Biden said Monday's report was an unpleasant echo of the run-up to
the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 -- a war that was launched based on
mistaken conclusions about Iraq's weapons programs. He said the result
of Bush's rhetoric has been to make it "far more difficult" to round up
support for continued sanctions on Tehran.

"It's hard to think of a more serious and more self-inflicted wound to
our national security than this president continues to inflict," Biden
said.

Republican National Committee spokesman Brian Walton said, "Apparently
Joe Biden has seen recent polling that shows his statistical
insignificance and is looking for relevance in the debate by offering
heated rhetoric."

Biden and other Democrats now hoping to replace Bush after 2008 used
the report to call for new talks with Iran over the nuclear issue,
offering the prospect of renewed economic and diplomatic ties in
exchange for a halt to uranium enrichment.

"I think we do know that pressure on Iran does have an effect," Sen.
Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-New York, said during a Democratic debate
Tuesday held by National Public Radio. "I think that is an important
lesson. But we're not going to reach the kind of resolution that we
should seek unless we put that into the context of a diplomatic
process."

And Sen. Barack Obama, D-Illinois, told the same forum that Bush
"continues to not let facts get in the way of his ideology."

"They should have stopped the saber rattling; should have never started
it. And they need, now, to aggressively move on the diplomatic front,"
he said.

But national security adviser Stephen Hadley said Monday that Bush was
not told to tone down his rhetoric about Iran's nuclear ambitions when
advised that a change in the U.S. estimate was coming -- and would have
made his remarks about "World War III" either way. advertisement

"It was making a point that the president and we have been making for
two or three years -- that the international community has to exert
more pressure, because Iran needs to suspend [its] enrichment program,"
Hadley said. "That continues to be our policy after this latest
national intelligence estimate."

And Bush said the new estimate "doesn't do anything to change my
opinion about the danger Iran poses to the world -- quite the contrary.