Mike the Usurper wrote:

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.

Yes, that's right, the king of the neo-cons thinks the CIA is now part of a left wing conspiracy to get W. And this is Rudy's #1 foreign policy guy.

I don't know whether or not the CIA is interested in checking the administration. I think the sentences which follow the one quoted above ought to speak for themselves:

This time the purpose is to head off the possibility that the President may order air strikes on the Iranian nuclear installations. As the intelligence community must know, if he were to do so, it would be as a last resort, only after it had become undeniable that neither negotiations nor sanctions could prevent Iran from getting the bomb, and only after being convinced that it was very close to succeeding.

It is hard for me to understand how a person could be smart enough to actually be Rudy Giuliani's foreign policy adviser and yet dumb enough to have written these words.

The present war with Iraq was not a last resort. The UN hadn't even completed their assessment. It was not undeniable that neither negotiations nor sanctions could prevent Iraq from getting WMD. There were many people who denied that Iraq had WMD at the time. Those people were ignored. Those people were also correct. Furthermore, no one has ever suggested that Iran is anywhere close to succeeding. Given the information that has been made public about the status of Iran's nuclear power program it is absolutely impossible under even the most pessimistic estimate that Iran could be "close to succeeding" during the remaining days of the Bush administration.

Any trust which this administration might have at some point had that they would only engage in warfare when there was absolutely no alternative was completely flushed down the toilet years ago. Furthermore, the very idea that military action should only be taken as a last resort is antithetical to the very philosophy of foreign relations to which this author adheres!

Dark Suspicions about the NIE - Norman Podhoretz