Dangerous Pretenders
January 14th, 2008Since I mocked Barack Obama for making the bogus claim that he was born from Bloody Selma, months ago and yesterday, let me be fair and point out that the Clinton campaigns and family and autobiography all have made the demonstrably bogus claim that Hillary was named after Sir Hillary of Mt. Everest fame (she was born years before his achievement). You know that there is a leadership gap in Washington when every politician is playing pretend, from Congressmen pretending that they have exercised anything resembling fiscal restraint over the last half decade (or sanity) to Ron Paul’s supporters seriously arguing that their man has a chance at all.
Worse still is the military, where we are sending more troops to Afghanistan, in an effort to counter the Taliban in the spring, while ignoring that we created the mess by failing to adequately occupy and rebuild Afghanistan initially and we still refuse to devote the time and money to the task as we should if we’re truly serious about stabilizing the nation and pushing al-Qaeda into further irrelevance. Let’s pretend that this yearly surge is sufficient and that eventually…what? We’ll have developed robots to patrol Kabul and Tora Bora?
Watching modern “leaders” lead makes me wish I could play pretend a little more often, truth be told, and I especially felt this way when I read this.
President George W. Bush hasn’t accomplished much on his voyage to the Middle East, but he did take the time to inflict another wound on the entire U.S. intelligence community—and on the credibility of anything he might ever again say about the world.
In the latest Newsweek, Michael Hirsh reports that, during a private conversation with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Bush “all but disowned” the agencies’ Dec. 3 National Intelligence Estimate on Iran. A “senior administration official who accompanied Bush” on the trip confided to Hirsh that Bush “told the Israelis that he can’t control what the intelligence community says, but that [the NIE’s] conclusions don’t reflect his own views.”
The NIE—which was signed by all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies—concluded “with high confidence” that Iran had “halted its nuclear weapons program” back in the fall of 2003. The estimate, released to the public in sanitized form, seriously undercut efforts by the Bush-Cheney White House to portray Iran’s nuclear ambitions as an imminent threat—and left the world either relieved or (especially in Israel’s case) alarmed that the option of a U.S. airstrike on Iran was pretty much off the table.
No pretending here — if Bush is going around telling leaders that he doesn’t trust his intelligence agencies, he makes everything we may or may not do (or have to do) for the remainder of his Presidency incredibly different. How do you think Adlai Stevenson would’ve looked confronting the Soviets at the United Nations if Jack Kennedy had once told his friends around the world that his government’s spywork and intelligence operations weren’t worth a damn?
Can’t we just fast-forward the next five years?