Intended Delusion

2002 - Bush declares that Iran is one of the countries in the "axis of evil"
2003 - The US invades Iraq and discovers that Iraq has no nuclear weapons program and no WMDs
2003 - Iran suspends its nuclear weapons program, long before there is any hope for success.
August 2, 2005 - In an article that could have been written this week, The Washington Post reports on the 2005 NIE which, according to the article, offers no proof of a nuclear weapons program in Iran
August 6, 2005 - Mahmoud Ahmadinejad takes the office of President of the Islamic Republic of Iran
2006 to 2007 - The US intelligence community discovers that Iran actually had a nuclear weapons program prior to 2003 and includes that fact in the 2007 NIE
December 4, 2007 - Bush, speaking about Iran and the 2007 NIA makes this statement at his December 4 news conference:
***
But their leadership is going to have to understand that defiance and hiding programs and defying IAEA is — is not the way forward.
And my hope is, is that, you know, the Iranian regime takes a look at their policies and changes their policies back to where we were prior to the election of Ahmadinejad, which was a hopeful period.
They had suspended their program. They were at the table. The United States has made some very positive gestures to convince them that there was a better way forward. And hopefully we can get back to that day.
***
So yesterday December 4, President Bush told the American people that prior to August 2005 when Ahmadinejad took his office as President of Iran, just after the 2005 NIE's release, diplomacy with Iran was looking up because Iran "had suspended their program." The US obviously knew that fact.
But now, December 2007, we are expected to believe that the 2005 NIE convinced us that Iran's nuclear weapons program was continuing and to understand that on that basis, Bush and Cheney have been accusing Iran of pursuing nuclear weapons.
In a criminal investigation it is important to analyze who did what when, who said what and when did they know. But why do we have to think in terms of criminal investigations in order to understand President Bush's foreign policy? Why does America have to be so shifty when dealing with the world? Why does Bush have to be so shifty when dealing with the American public?
OK, a dose of reality here:
* According to the August 2005 Washington Post article referenced above, the 2005 NIE offered no proof that Iran had ever had a nuclear weapons program
* The 2007 NIE, whose revelations the White House attempted to suppress, finally revealed that prior to 2003, Iran ACTUALLY HAD a nuclear weapons program
* There's no reason to believe that the White House didn't know about any of this in a timely manner
I'm left to conclude that there's an irony to all of this. What the 2007 NIE actually revealed was that there ever was a nuclear weapons program in Iran. Prior to this new NIE, there was no such evidence. Yet prior to the release of the 2007 NIE, Bush and Cheney were making every attempt to convince the American people and the world that Iran's nuclear power research was in reality a nuclear weapons program. Prior to 2007, Bush and Cheney had no evidence to support their claims. Yet they did not want the American people to know what the 2007 NIE revealed. Why? Why did Bush and Cheney not want the American people and the world to know that Iran had ever in fact had a nuclear weapons program?
The answer is clear to me, but I'll leave my readers to come to their own conclusions.