Belmont Club on NIE

The Belmont Club:

I guess the Europeans were content to play the "good cop" as long as Washington played the "bad cop". Now that the current NIE has made that role harder to play, that essential role must be fulfilled by someone else. Which just goes to show that a lot of the criticism directed at Washington simply goes with the turf of being the leading power in the world.

Read the rest at the link.

Remarks. Once again, Richard "Wretchard the cat" Fernandez says it more clearly and succinctly than I can. I'll just remind readers that I suspect the Bush Administration is very adept at playing the game of "be careful what you wish for, you might get it" with its adversaries. I linked The American Thinker's article arguing that

[the NIE] will cause a fuss in the media in Israel (which is under the gun most directly), but also in Saudi, the Gulf States, Europe, the United States, and even Russia, where everybody has been happily demagoguing W for ages, secure in the knowledge that Uncle Sam would help them if they encountered real danger from the martyrdom brigade.

It's very clever. Some countries are suddenly getting serious about Tehran's nukes. The UK Guardian (!) has been writing about the danger, the same folks who've been blowing superheated steam like Old Faithful ever since the overthrow of Saddam. The Brits, Germans and French have told the press that the Americans are just wrong again, just like with Saddam, but now in the opposite way. With Saddam, the myth goes, there were no WMDs, but now Iran has them coming for sure.

In Israel, people are going bananas, realizing that the danger is very real, and that the US can't pull their chestnuts out of the fire without some painful compromises with the Arabs.

In Saudi, according to Max Boot's recent article in the WSJ, they're sounding like neocons about Iran. Everybody is shaking in their boots, and rightly so.

In my own post on the NIE, I compared the new document to last year's Baker-Hamilton report on Iraq. The New York Sun had similar ideas:

It's the return of Baker-Hamilton. A year ago, this newspaper was the first to alert Americans to the dangers of this panel's recommendations regarding Iraq. We ran the first report that these congressionally-appointed "wise" men were fashioning a call to retreat from the Battle of Iraq and to appease those states sabotaging the nation-building there. Our Eli Lake also broke the story of the commission's scheme to press for Israel's relinquishment of the Golan Heights in hopes of stabilizing Iraq.

A month after the release of the commission's report, President Bush brushed aside the council of defeatists. Instead of offering a "diplomatic surge," whereby Secretary Rice would visit — hat in hand — Tehran and Damascus asking what we might be able to do to get them to stop terrorizing our soldiers and Iraq's civilians, the president led with a military surge. He announced that we were going to disrupt the supply lines of the enemy, and he ordered General Petraeus to protect Baghdad from confessional cleansers block by block. ...

It'll be interesting to see what happens next. As the Belmont Club observes, nothing scares the Left more than the prospect of having to face real threats on their own.

Related.
The National Intelligence Estimate.

Comments

[Alex]

And what do you think of Obadiah Shoher's arguments against the peace process ( samsonblinded.org/blog/we-need-a-respite-from-peace.htm )?

[Tom the Redhunter]

Comparing this NIE to the Iraq Study Group (Baker Hamilton) wasn't something I'd thought of, but it's certainly appropriate.

If the Iranians had in fact stopped their program, I'm sure they're starting it up right now. After all, the NIE assures that Bush won't do anything to them, and if a Dem is elected to the White House they'll be home free.