A Chequer-Board of Nights and Days

It is no secret that blogger Steve Clemons has been a wee bit obsessed when it comes to the subject of former UN Ambassador John Bolton, leading, of course, to the titling of this post and the comparisons with one of the characters in this somewhat well known story. Clemons rarely misses a chance to let his obsessions go unsatisfied and so, today, in response to this editorial by Ambassador Bolton on the issue of the recent NIE on Iran, Clemons has this post comparing Bolton's rhetoric with MoveOn.org's "General Betray Us" ad that so spectacularly backfired. According to Clemons, Bolton is trashing intelligence analysts the same way that MoveOn.org trashed General David Petraeus, even stating that Bolton "essentially accuses the entire national security intelligence establishment of betraying American interests in the 2007 Iran National Intelligence Estimate."

Really? Let's look at the "proof" that Clemons offers for this . . . interesting proposition, proof that is presented in the form of an excerpt from Bolton's editorial:

. . .many involved in drafting and approving the NIE were not intelligence professionals but refugees from the State Department, brought into the new central bureaucracy of the director of national intelligence. These officials had relatively benign views of Iran's nuclear intentions five and six years ago; now they are writing those views as if they were received wisdom from on high. In fact, these are precisely the policy biases they had before, recycled as "intelligence judgments."

That such a flawed product could emerge after a drawn-out bureaucratic struggle is extremely troubling. While the president and others argue that we need to maintain pressure on Iran, this "intelligence" torpedo has all but sunk those efforts, inadequate as they were. Ironically, the NIE opens the way for Iran to achieve its military nuclear ambitions in an essentially unmolested fashion, to the detriment of us all.

Nowhere--except in Clemons's fevered imaginings--can this be read as accusing the intelligence community or the national security apparatus as a whole of "betraying American interests." Bolton took issue with the methodology behind the NIE, as is his right to do. As a former Undersecretary of State for Arms Control, his commentary should be taken seriously. If Clemons wishes to take issue with that commentary, that would be his right, of course, but Clemons doesn't do that. Instead, he merely seeks to equate Bolton with the destructive caricature that MoveOn.org created for itself when it released the "General Betray Us" ad to near universal groans of disbelief and disapproval. Such attempts at character assassination are par for the course for Clemons, and they are driven by his obsession with Bolton, but they do not a substantive national security argument make.

It is, of course, a pity that Clemons chooses to ignore the substance of Bolton's commentary and instead relies on a smear job to substitute for an argument. But then, that is what we have come to expect from "the reality-based community," which once again shows that it is anything but. In the meantime, for Clemons, here is a little cinematic tribute that naturally comes to mind when thinking of his blogging style: