The Bomb, the Hulk, and What are We Going to do about Grandpa?

"We judge with high confidence that in Fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program."(October 31st NIE)

So Ahmadhadhiminadhinajhad stopped building The Bomb in 2003. (About this time I finally dropped "the bomb" from my lexicon; no 30 year old man should use this phrase regularly, the exception being as a culinary descriptor (i.e., "this boxed Bordeaux is the bomb").)

What a blow to the Neo-Cons. Cheney's battery powered ticker skipped a beat. John Bolton nearly wiped the dead mouse from his upper lip. The Judeo-Christian response, articulated in Ha'aretz , is an ad hominim attack on the U.S. intelligence community. The stallion RumChenFeithaWolfaRice once rode into Iraq they now call an ass.

No one wants Iran to be able to turn green when it gets angry. The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty has succeeded in limiting the spread of nuclear weapons, for the most part (red = known capacity, dark brown = stated capacity, light brown = possible capacity).

I heard Ambassador Dennis Ross address this issue recently. Iran building The Bomb isn't merely a threat to the U.S.; it's far more than a simple terrorist threat. A Hulkanized Iran would threaten the delicate regional balance. According to Ross, a nuclear Iran would lead to nuclear weapons capacity in Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and others. There are sufficient numbers of states with Hulk capacity, the kind that can build The Bomb without even dreaming big and giving it their all. Presently, these states lack sufficient reason for developing nuclear capacity, but a nuclear Iran would change all that.

Thus Bush is right about the severity of anIranian Hulk.

But this in no way excuses Bush's extraordinarily obfuscatory reading of the NEI and what the intelligence community now says about Iran. Here's Bush's interpretation: "I view this report as a warning signal that they had the program, they halted the program," Bush said. "The reason why it's a warning signal is they could restart it."

I'm confused. The NEI stating that Iran's halting its program is a warning sign?

LOOK OUT! I'M DISMANTLING MY NUCLEAR WEAPONS PROGRAM! WATCH IT! LET THIS DISMANTLING BE A WARNING TO YOU!

Some analogous non sequiters:
CAUSE: The Bears bench Rex Grossman. EFFECT: GROSSMAN RETURNS!
CAUSE: DoD cancels its Star Wars program. EFFECT: DoD BUILDS MISSILE DEFENSE SHIELD!
CAUSE: Iran cancels nuclear program. EFFECT: IRAN BUILDS THE BOMB!


The NEI report states, no matter how Bush reads it, that Iran is not about to turn green. What the report calls "international pressure" has worked and continues to work. According to the report, Tehran is guided by a "cost-benefit approach," not by ideology. In other words, incentives can work to keep Iran in Bruce Banner form.

Bush calling this a "warning" is an absurd misreading, even in this age of snot on a doorknob semantic slipperiness. It makes you wonder about the hermeneutic standards with which he reads other intelligence estimates, the news, My Pet Goat. Or if he reads them at all.

Dennis Miller once said of Senator Robert Byrd

"...this guy stands there and lectures Bush in the well of the Senate. He was in the Ku Klux Klan! He's demented. You know, this guy's burning the cross at both ends! And you know something, if Robert Byrd were your grandfather and he came to Thanksgiving dinner and went off one of these demented screeds, everybody would sit there smiling at him, and as soon as he left the room, somebody'd say, 'Hey, what the hell are we gonna do about Grandpa?'"

So Bush stands there on the podium and lectures the intelligence community, sort of a demented screed. What the hell are we gonna do about Grandpa?