The leading theory is that hardline hawks, who have been up in arms over the likelihood that Bush is going to conclude a deal soon with North Korea, somehow finagled the IC into holding the briefing as a way of stirring up trouble and making the deal less likely to proceed. Since hawks hate treaties of all kinds, and especially hate the prospect of a treaty with North Korea, this is plausible.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
There’s a lot more in that vein.<\/p>\n
But none of it makes sense to me; it implies a level of internal control by midlevel players that just smells wrong to me.<\/p>\n
But as long as we’re speculating…<\/p>\n
…here’s one that will keep Kevin up nights worrying.<\/p>\n
Remember all the hoo-hah about Iraqi convoys secretly headed to Syria by air or by land? The ones with the missing WMD? (Personally, if I was Saddam, I’d have been exporting bullion, but I’d obviously make a crappy dictator.<\/p>\n
One reason I immediately deprecated those rumors was that there was no sense in Bush not playing that hand hard and wiping out his political opposition.<\/p>\n
At heart, I still believe that to be true.<\/p>\n
But reading Kevin’s post a spark of an idea lit up. If I was a Karl Rovian evil political genius, what would I do with that information? When would it be the most powerful, politically?<\/p>\n
Hmmm. How about…July or August of 2008?<\/p>\n
Imagine if you would a steady drip-drip-drip of information like this leading up to – viola! – hard information that Saddam actually had WMD all along. Imagine being at the Democratic Convention, having just nominated Obama when the news got out. Imagine Karl Rove laughing so hard he pees his pants.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Imagine Karl Rove, laughing…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1726"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1726"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1726\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1726"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1726"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1726"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}