The thousand volt farce By Melanie Phillips December 5, 2007 The Spectator Original Source: http://www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips/388926/the-thousand-volt-farce.thtml How Iran is laughing. Ahmadinejad http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/7128360.stm declares that yesterday’s US National Intelligence Estimate is announcing a victory for the Iranian nation in the nuclear issue against all international powers. Indeed, with this report America has achieved the remarkable feat of dealing a terrible blow to all those fighting to defend civilization. It has actually strengthened Ahmadinejad, whose grip on power had until yesterday been looking ever more fragile. But then the US handed him a priceless gift in the form of the NIE report which says, in effect, that US intelligence hasn’t got a clue about the Iranian nuclear threat. We can all see from its ludicrously threadbare reasoning — much of merely using guesswork to assess Iran’s intentions, in the absence of reliable information on the ground — that intelligence of any sort is clearly in short supply in the US security world. The http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2007/12/print/20071204-4.html%20 statement by President Bush that the report is a very important product… is clearly nonsense. Despite the reforms to the intelligence community which he claims have worked, the US clearly continues to have a major problem with both the competence and good faith of its intelligence services. They must now be considered themselves to represent a threat to the west that they ostensibly serve — and Bush’s pathetic attempt to square the circle of the Iran assessments merely reinforces America’s humiliation. As reported below, the Israelis don’t buy the NIE assessment. No-one with a functioning brain — let alone the country in Iran’s sights — could surely do so. Even the International Atomic Energy Agency doesn’t buy it — the body which is usually at the end of an American kicking for not being bullish enough. The http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/05/world/middleeast/05iran.html?_r=1&oref=slogin%20 New York Timesreports: 'To be frank, we are more skeptical,’ a senior official close to the agency said. ‘We don’t buy the American analysis 100 percent. We are not that generous with Iran.’ The official called the American assertion that Iran had ‘halted’ its weapons program in 2003 ‘somewhat surprising'. To put it mildly. As things stand at present, America has abandoned everything it has stood for since 9/11. It has now prostrated itself before Ahmadinejad and invited him to stamp on its head. It has given up on the fight against Syrian despotism in Lebanon where the new president, General Michel Suleiman, is a pro-Syria Hezbollah puppet. And it has betrayed Israel at Annapolis: as I said in a previous post, America’s Munich with Israel in the role of Czechoslovakia. What is the explanation for this? I am beginning to think that it is all about Iraq. The line coming out of the Israeli government after Annapolis was that this wasn’t about Israel and the Arabs at all. It was instead about bringing Saudi Arabia and others on board to construct an alliance against Iran, and building international capital in order that Israel might convince a sceptical world that Iran really was an unconscionable threat. It is surely no accident, therefore, that the NIE volte-face was published after Annapolis. Had the US declared beforehand that Iran wasn’t really a danger after all, Israel would never have taken part in that farce. As it is, Israel has now been absolutely betrayed. Having been humiliated at Annapolis and pushed by the US into a process in which it is expected to make suicidal concessions to people who will not even recognise the Jews’ right to their own homeland and are trying every day to kill its citizens, it now finds that, far from persuading the world that Iran is a mortal threat that must be stopped, America has actually told the world that it has no idea whether Iran is now a threat at all. So why has America done this? Because it has sold Israel to the devil, in the shape of Iran and Saudi Arabia, in order to save its skin in Iraq. As we know, it is of overwhelming importance to President Bush that peace comes to Iraq by November’s presidential election. The situation in Iraq over the past few months has dramatically improved. This has been assumed to be because, under the shrewd strategic leadership of General Petraeous, the previously terror-supporting and fratricidal tribal leaders finally turned against al Qaeda and decided to unite to reclaim their country from the endless spiral of mass murder. But there may be another explanation. The http://samsonblinded.org/blog/america-arranges-a-peace-deal-with-iran.htm%20 Samson Blinded blog suggests the US did a deal with Iran, in which Iran wound down its support for terror in Iraq — in return for which the US promised not to bomb Iran. The NIE was published to cloak this decision in the convenient if implausible fiction of the scaling down by the US intelligence community of the Iranian threat. The major player at Annapolis was Saudi Arabia. It was Saudi’s ‘peace plan’ to destroy Israel which the US was trying to force Israel to accept. My own sources suggest that at the heart of Annapolis was another deal done with Saudi Arabia by the US. Saudi is absolutely terrified by the power of Iran, which it perceives as a major threat to itself and its role in the entire region. Saudi well understands that for Iran, the destruction of Israel is the core goal of goals which is driving Iran’s nuclear weapons programme — a programme that also directly threatens Saudi itself. So it made a deal with the US. Saudi would tell its terror puppets in Iraq to back off — and as a quid pro quo the US would force Israel to the negotiating table with the Palestinians and set in train a process to force it into concessions that would deal it a mortal blow. Thus two birds would be killed with one stone: Iran’s frenzied impulse to build a nuclear weapon — and Israel itself. If this analysis is correct, Israel’s existence and the safety of the world have thus been bargained away in exchange for the ability of a US president to declare success in Iraq. The NIE report is of course being cheered on by all who see America (and Israel) rather than Iran as the major threat to the world. Those who believe the poisonous fiction about the ‘neocon conspiracy’ will once again be unable to grasp what is staring them in the face. Indeed, madness over Iraq is now broadening into madness over Iran. Those whose truncated brain processes tell them that the failure to discover weapons of mass destruction in Iraq proves that they never existed now claim that the Iranian threat is no more than a malevolently constructed fiction. Neocon ‘warmongers’, they say, believe US intelligence when it says there is a threat but not when it says there isn’t. This ignores the context of that intelligence. All intelligence should be regarded with a degree of circumspection. It has to be assessed in the light of everything else that we know about the given situation. Given what we knew back in the 1990s about Saddam -- his regional ambitions, ties to terror and WMD efforts -- it is reasonable to conclude that US intelligence first failed to assess correctly the threat he posed to the west; then got part of it right; and then devoted the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq to putting out disinformation in order to cover up their own past incompetence. And given what we know about Iran, the NIE’s volte-face simply isn’t credible. The report states as firmly as it can that Iran was developing a nuclear weapon until 2003. Is it really likely that it would have stopped and not re-started? If so, why is it continuing to defy the international community by enriching weapons grade uranium in 3,000 centrifuges? Why doesn’t it open up all its nuclear sites to IAEA inspectors? Why has it gone to such lengths to scatter and bury its nuclear installations? Why would a country whose president has said: ‘We must get ready to rule the world… the Islamic government in Iran is the pre-requisite for a world wide Islamic state’, which has committed itself publicly to the destruction of Israel and which is responsible for blowing up coalition soldiers in Iraq as part of its three decade-war against the west, want to restrict its nuclear technology to the blameless production of electricity? Those who bat such questions away would believe in fairies at the bottom of the garden. The west is signing its own death warrant. With its ignorance and stupidity exceeded only by its arrogance, it is unable to see that it is being played for suckers. Pull yourself together, Mr President. You may score temporarily in Iraq, but at what terrible cost?