Has Bush simply given up?

Alan Levine has an interesting speculation as to President Bush’s real motivation in the strange NIE affair:

[H]e was too weak to lead any effective action against the Iranians, so [he] either encouraged people sabotaging a hard policy, or let them go ahead uncontested, to avoid admitting this point—possibly even to himself. It is also possible that he is so demoralized that he does not or cannot bring himself to do anything.

Meanwhile, the Washington Times reports:

Several current and former high-level government officials familiar with the authors of the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran described the report as a politically motivated document written by anti-Bush former State Department officials, who opposed sanctioning foreign governments and businesses.

The article names the anti-Bush officials. However, it doesn’t explain why President Bush allowed the report to be released and why he definitively accepted its conclusions.

In the Lucianne commentary on the same article, L-dotters unload on those they call the traitors who have undermined Bush and compromised America’s security. None of the L-dotters asks the obvious question: why, if this report was intended to undermine Bush, did Bush fully endorse its conclusions?

How can human reason operate, if there are certain questions and possibilities one must never go near? For example, the possibility that Bush is an empty suit, who filled the suit with universalist braggadocio, and when the universalism was discredited, he went back to being an empty suit?

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 07, 2007 07:26 PM | Send