Hullabaloo

Friday, December 07, 2007

 
From The Wrong About Everything File

by digby


I know that I'm just a dirty hippie partisan whore who has no clue about anything, but it does seem my ill-informed intuition may have been correct when I wrote the other day that the neocons would be out in force doing what they always do. And it appears that the mainstream media may be listening.

From Ilan Goldenberg at Democracy Arsenal

In recent days conservative like [Ilan]Berman, Norman Podhoretz, Danielle Pletka and Jon Bolton, have been trying to cast doubt on the conclusions of the intelligence community. Now the Washington Post is picking up on it and lending the arguments more credibility. When reading these arguments it's worthwhile to remember a few basic facts that should absolutely discredit this entire crowd.

First, none of these people have access to the actual intelligence. They are sitting at think tanks outside of the intelligence community and simply haven't seen the data. This was a report that shows the basic consensus of the nation's 16 intelligence and it was produced on the Bush Administration's watch and ultimately approved by the Director of National Intelligence, Mike McConnell, who is a Bush Administration appointee.

Second, and this is even more important. This conservative and neo-conservative crowd has a long history of disregarding and manipulating intelligence when it doesn't fall conveniently into their world view. The Team B exercises in the late 1970s found that Soviet intentions and capabilities were much more dangerous than previously estimated by the intelligence community. It became part of the justification for a major military buildup against the Soviets. The Rumsfeld Commission in the 1990s was specifically set up to dispute the Intelligence Community's conclusions that the ballistic missile defense threat from developing countries to the American mainland was not an immediate danger. It became the basis for greater investment in a National Missile Defense. The Office of Special Plans that was set up in the Pentagon in the run up to the Iraq War, was specifically charged with trying to find connections between Al Qaeda and Iraq. It was used to support arguments for War.

In all of these cases conservatives played with and disregarded intelligence to help make their cases for a particular policy. And in all of these cases the conservatives were wrong.

This is where the Serious Villagers never being held accountable for being wrong becomes a problem. I realize that it's impolite and impolitic to publicly excoriate intellectuals and policy experts who make huge mistakes like the Iraq war. I would imagine it makes relationships in the workplace and social circles quite unpleasant. But unless some standard is created and enforced, people will take advantage of the fact that nobody is ever held liable and will just keep doing this stuff for their own ends.

And their friends in the Village media will nearly always go along because according to their he said/she said construct, they have no obligation to ever sort out truth from lies. Each issue or policy question exists in its own vacuum. Therefore, credibility is irrelevant.

In this case it's patently obvious to anyone who's given even a perfunctory look at this, that the bloodthirsty neoconservatives have a track record over 30 years of exaggerating threats. It's what they do. Iraq was the first big time shooting war they actually achieved --- and look what happened. The intelligence services are far from perfect, and their assessments are hardly holy writ, but the neocons are completely and wholly lacking in credibility and honesty. They should never be taken seriously by anyone again.

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digby 12/07/2007 09:04:00 AM |