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Power Line posts on Huckabee’s assertion his lack of foreign policy experience is analogous to Ronald Reagan. They think more like Jimmy Carter.
… When it comes to foreign policy, Huckabee more closely resembles another former governor, Jimmy Carter. It was Carter, not Reagan, who viewed foreign policy as an extension of his own character and personal principles. Carter stood for a foreign policy “as decent as the American people.” Reagan stood for defeating our enemies. When Huckabee frets about how Gitmo is making us appear to foreigners, when he asserts that “we broke Iraq,” and when he says he’s qualified to be commander-in-chief because of his character rather than because of his understanding of our enemies, it’s pretty clear that his foreign policy roots extend nowhere near the fertile soil of Reaganism.
The Line also posts on Harry Reid still hoping for defeat in Iraq.
Norman Podhoretz from Contentions starts a long line of posts on the new National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran. Most everybody, except for Mike Huckabee (more on that later) has remarked on this report.
A new National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), entitled “Iran: Nuclear Intentions and Capabilities,†has just dealt a serious blow to the argument some of us have been making that Iran is intent on building nuclear weapons and that neither diplomacy nor sanctions can prevent it from succeeding. …
… I must confess to suspecting that the intelligence community, having been excoriated for supporting the then universal belief that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, is now bending over backward to counter what has up to now been a similarly universal view (including as is evident from the 2005 NIE, within the intelligence community itself) that Iran is hell-bent on developing nuclear weapons. I also suspect that, having been excoriated as well for minimizing the time it would take Saddam to add nuclear weapons to his arsenal, the intelligence community is now bending over backward to maximize the time it will take Iran to reach the same goal.
But I entertain an even darker suspicion. It is that the intelligence community, which has for some years now been leaking material calculated to undermine George W. Bush, is doing it again. …
… So at the end of this NIE you come away knowing not much more than when you started. Basically you are left with the knowledge that the Iranians are pursuing nuclear work that probably won’t result in a bomb in the next couple of years but that could produce a weapon sometime thereafter. And most of those key judgments are delivered with only “moderate confidence.†Given the intelligence community’s consistent track record of being wrong in the past, especially about other nations’ nuclear programs (the CIA has been surprised in the past by, among others, Iraq, North Korea, Libya, India, and Pakistan) that doesn’t inspire much, well, confidence.
… Without access to the underlying intelligence on which these back-and-forth assertions in this committee-produced document are founded, interpreting them involves groping in the dark. But the peculiar language, and the disclosure of dissenting views expressed by the Department of Energy and the National Intelligence Council, strongly hint that sharp internal divisions exist about the precise nature of the Iranian halt — if it is a halt at all.
Connecting the Dots, which has been highly critical of leaks of classified information, is left in the uncomfortable position of hoping for a leak of classified information that will resolve all the mysteries surrounding this new assessment of the Iranian nuclear program. Only one thing can be said with “high confidence†about this new NIE: when sharp divisions exist within the U.S. Intelligence Community, leaks are on the way.
Schoenfeld again answering Podhoretz’s suspicions about CIA crossing up Bush.
… There are significant ambiguities in this NIE, and as Max Boot rightly points out, it still leaves ample reason to worry about Iranian nuclear ambitions. But in the current climate of skepticism about the competence of the CIA and other intelligence bodies, the idea that intelligence officials engaged in a coordinated effort to cook the evidence seems impossible to credit. Even if there was a shared desire among all sixteen agencies to do such a thing (which seems implausible on its face) pulling off such a caper would be a hugely difficult task, and almost certainly beyond the capacity even of America’s most ingenious spies — assuming we even have any ingenious spies.
Although I remain as worried as Norman Podhoretz about the dangers posed by an Iran armed with nuclear weapons, and though there is ample reason to wonder about the quality of U.S. intelligence, I would still have to put “low confidence†in his dark suspicions.
A day has passed since the release of the new intelligence-community estimate of the Iranian program and the smell of rotting fish is growing stronger. Even the editorial page of the New York Times is wondering if the NIE erred on the side of incaution. It reports that an official “close†to the International Atomic Energy Agency “told the Times yesterday that new American assessment might be too generous to Iran.â€
Any careful reading of the NIE makes its obvious that this is true. The report’s stark opening declaration – made with “high confidence†– that Iran halted its nuclear-weapons program in 2003 is blatantly misleading. The only thing that was halted in 2003 was what the intelligence community calls the military side of Iran’s nuclear program. …
… But in dismissing Norman’s dark suspicions, did I treat his claim “a bit too literally,†as Ben Orlanski has written in the comments section in response to my post? Orlanski goes on to explain:
This isn’t a question of cooking the books to produce bogus information to defeat Bush. It is a question of how this was spun. The NIE report chose to lead with the made-for-headline finding about the halt to the program. But this isn’t really the most relevant part of the report, just the part that was pretty clearly intended to grab headlines. Is saying that a conspiracy? I don’t think so. I think the authors wanted to impact the political debate, and did so not by lying or creating bogus conclusions or reasoning, but simply by choosing to emphasize the part of their overall conclusions that played most pointedly into the political environment. [This] suggest[s] certain political canniness [on the part] of our intelligence agencies, and also suggests that they wanted to have an impact on ultimate policy. That is not their role, and there is something disconcerting about their assuming it.
With this I would entirely agree. If that is indeed what happened here, and the evidence that it did so is in front of our eyes, and if it is indeed what Norman was saying, then, like the intelligence-community’s disavowal of its 2005 NIE, I would have to disavow my previous “low confidence†estimate in Norman “dark suspicions†and join him in voicing equally dark suspicions of my own.
Abe Greenwald, also in Contentions, with the Dem reactions.
If Iran did halt its nuclear weaponization program in 2003, then we can thank the U.S. military presence in Iraq. Yet the Democrats consider the NIE an indication of the effectiveness of diplomacy. Here’s a round-up:
… What on earth is wrong with the American intelligence community? Granted that of necessity it can make public only the bare minimum of information, this report provokes a high degree of scepticism. It asserts:
We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program.
But in 2005 this same intelligence community was saying:
“[We] assess with high confidence that Iran currently is determined to develop nuclear weapons despite its international obligations and international pressure, but we do not assess that Iran is immovable.”
So are we now to assume that in 2005, Iran was ‘determined to develop nuclear weapons’ despite having ‘halted its nuclear weapon programme’ two years earlier? Were the intelligence community simply wrong in 2005? And if they were that incompetent then, why should we believe what they are saying now? …
Byron York has the last post on the NIE. Finally! This goes full circle to Huckabee’s opinion of the new NIE. He hadn’t heard of it. That’s right!
Power Line with a change of subject. Their view of the detainees at Gitmo is opposite Stuart Taylor’s.
Tomorrow, the Supreme Court will hear argument in the case of Boumediene v. Bush, in which foreign detainees challenge the legality and constitutionality of their detention as enemy combatants pursuant to the Military Commissions Act of 2006. To understand the issues in this case, I can’t think of a better source than this on-line debate presented by the Federalist Society. …
The Captain thinks the NY Times is “bailing on Hillary.”
The New York Times offers an unusually pessimistic appraisal of Hillary Clinton’s effect on the 2008 down-ticket races. Carl Hulse reports that Congressional incumbents and candidates have begun to fear that her nomination will energize a dispirited opposition and could cost the Democrats the seats they gained in 2006. It’s not exactly a new thought, but usually it gets expressed as Republican optimism (via Memeorandum): …
John Stossel has more on the tragedy of the commons.
My Thanksgiving column about how the pilgrims nearly starved practicing communal farming but thrived once they switched to private cultivation made some people angry. One commented, “Sharing of the fruits of our labor is a bad thing?”
I never said that.
I practice charity regularly. I believe in sharing. But when government takes our money by force and gives it to others, that’s not sharing.
And sharing can’t be a basis for production — you can’t share what hasn’t been produced. My point is that production and prosperity require property rights. Property rights associate effort with benefits. Where benefits are unrelated to effort, people do the least amount necessary to get by while taking the most they can get. Economists have a pithy way of summing up this truth: No one washes a rental car.
It’s called the “tragedy of the commons.” …
Walter Williams has more on income mobility.
Listening to people like Lou Dobbs, John Edwards and Mike Huckabee lamenting the plight of America’s middle class and poor, you’d have to conclude that things are going to hell in a handbasket. According to them, there’s wage stagnation, while the rich are getting richer and the poor becoming poorer. There are a couple of updates that tell quite a different story.
The Nov. 13 Wall Street Journal editorial “Movin’ On Up” reports on a recent U.S. Treasury study of income tax returns from 1996 and 2005. The study tracks what happened to tax filers 25 years of age and up during this 10-year period. Controlling for inflation, nearly 58 percent of the poorest income group in 1996 moved to a higher income group by 2005. Twenty-six percent of them achieved middle or upper-middle class income, and over 5 percent made it into the highest income group.
Over the decade, the inflation-adjusted median income of all tax filers rose by 24 percent. As such, it refutes Dobbs-Edwards-Huckabee claims about stagnant incomes. In fact, only one income group experienced a decline in real income. That was the richest one percent, who saw an income drop of nearly 26 percent over the 10-year period. …