I stand not exactly corrected, since I may not have written anything that was incorrect, but I fear I took more credit than I deserved in my post last week titled Bush’s Clintonian Parsing?
In that piece, I hypothesized that if you looked at Pres. Bush’s statements before and after August (when he learned about the new National Intelligence Estimate) about Iran’s nuclear ambitions, you could see evidence that the Prez had incorporated certain weasel words to protect against the claim that he was ignoring the new intelligence estimate. But the changes were so subtle that you wouldn’t notice them at the time. I strongly implied that the piece was original to me (and indeed, I did come up with the analysis on my own). I wrote the piece Thursday afternoon and posted it Friday morning.
I have since learned that others noticed the same pattern and wrote about it earlier. I would like to credit Dan Froomkin’s piece on Wednesday and perhaps others for developing and publishing the same analysis before I did. The management regrets any unintentional implicit scoop stealing.
Eric, my respect for you and your ethics just went up 1000 percent.
I saw the Froomkin piece about the same time as yours, and his take on the story was equally interesting but rather different. Hey, this is not Wallace and Darwin on evolution or Newton and Lienitz on calculus; you saw what many of us suspected, but you did the homework. At the time Bush began talking about forbidding Iran the chance to acquire the knowledge of nuclear bomb making, the trout was clearly in the milk; it was too much like Iraq’s “WMD related activities.”
A question I have about Iran strategy is whatever happened to that mainstay of the conflict with the USSR, Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD)? Frankly, why do we worry about them getting a handful of a-bombs if it is clear that if they use them, significant portions of Iran will be reduced to piles of smoldering radioactive rubble?