[NYTr] Dowd: Seven Days in December?

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

sent by Ed Pearl

The New York Times - Dec 5, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/05/opinion/05dowd.html

Seven Days in December?

By MAUREEN DOWD
WASHINGTON

At the White House news conference yesterday, The Chicago Tribune's Mark
Silva gingerly snuck up on a state-of-mind question.

"I can't help but read your body language this morning, Mr. President,"
he said. "You seem somehow dispirited, somewhat dispirited."

W. did look like a kid who'd just had his toys taken away. But he acted
humorously exasperated, as he always does when the talk turns
introspective.

"This is like, all of a sudden, it's like Psychology 101, you know?" he
said, as reporters laughed.

The reporters pressed on about whether the president was troubled about
a possible "credibility gap" with the American people, given that the
facts had failed him on Iraq and Iran and that Harry Reid had charged
that "the president is not leveling with the American people" on war
spending.

Even though Norman Podhoretz is conjuring up a "Seven Days in December"
spy thriller scenario in which the intelligence agencies colluded to
sabotage the president and prevent him from the noble mission of air
strikes on Iran, W. insisted he felt "pretty good about life."

He said that the breathtaking and embarrassing reversal in the National
Intelligence Estimate about Iran's nuclear capability - from "high
confidence" in 2005 that the mullahs were developing a nuke to "high
confidence" that they stopped the program in 2003 - somehow made it
clear that he was right.

If W. can shape the intelligence to match his faith-based beliefs, as
with Iraq, then he will believe the intelligence - no matter how
incredible it is.

If he can't shape it to match his beliefs, as with Iran, then he will
disregard the intelligence - no matter how credible it is.

Even though Sy Hersh claims that the top echelon of the White House has
long known of the conclusion that Iran had stopped its nuke program,
and that Dick Cheney "has kept his foot on the neck of that report,"
the president says he was briefed on it only last week. Others
conspiratorially speculate that the president had to have green-lighted
the report to take the air out of the hawks' Iran push.

Just because the facts on which he based his white-hot rhetoric about
Iran possibly sparking World War III have been debunked, W. said with
his usual twisted logic, why should his policy change?

Indeed, John Bolton, who must have been paying attention in his Psych
101 class, argued to Wolf Blitzer that the intelligence analysts "got
Iraq wrong and they're overcompensating by understating the potential
threat from Iran."

George Tenet helped hawks like Mr. Cheney and Mr. Bolton overstate the
case on Iraq W.M.D. Then, when things went wrong, W., Cheney and Condi
made Mr. Tenet the fall guy.

After getting Iraq wrong and Iran wrong in 2005 and almost every other
big thing wrong since the nation began spending billions every year on
intelligence, the burned spooks may not have wanted to play the patsy
again while W., Cheney and the neocons beat the drums for an Iran
invasion.

Now the apple-polishing George Tenet is gone. The man who oversaw the
new estimate is Tom Fingar, a former State Department intelligence
officer who was smart and brave enough to object to the cooked-up
intelligence on Iraqi W.M.D.

"The way they used to do business was to write estimates in a way that
couched things so they said, 'We may not always be right, but we're
never wrong,' " said Tim Weiner, the reporter for The Times who wrote
the award-winning history of the C.I.A., "Legacy of Ashes." "This is a
slam-dunk reversal, admitting error. Now, when they play poker, they
show their hands to each other, so they don't get another curveball."

The president, who has shut out reality for seven years, justified
continuing in his world of ideological illusion by saying that he would
not be "blinded" to the realities of the world. You can't get more
Orwellian than that.

"And so," W. concluded triumphantly, and nonsensically, "kind of
Psychology 101 ain't working."

W. loves to act as though psychology is voodoo even though his whole
misbegotten foreign policy has been conducted from his gut, by checking
the body language of his inner circle and looking into the hearts and
souls of dictatorial leaders.

If I were looking at the latest fiasco from a Psych 101 point of view,
I'd say it was another daddy issue for W.

Poppy Bush, who was once C.I.A. director, loved the agency and liked to
sign notes: "Head Spook." The C.I.A. headquarters bear his name.

W., by contrast, has voiced contempt for the intelligence community. In
2004, he dismissed a pessimistic National Intelligence Estimate that
didn't match his sunny vision of the Iraq occupation, saying that the
analysts were "just guessing as to what the conditions might be like."

When W.'s history is written, he will be seen as the rebellious teenager
crashing the family station wagon into his father's three most cherished
spots - diplomacy, intelligence and the Gulf.