Biden's take on Bush & the NIE

Biden's grasp of the situation seems pretty solid to me (not so much his grasp of sentence structure, but then Bush has set the bar pretty low in that regard. I've noted however, that Cheney speaks in perfectly grammatical, discrete sound bites, albeit out of the side of his mouth. Even that has failed to endear him to me, however.)

from Hardball with Chris Matthews this week:

MATTHEWS: Well, this propaganda war that's been fought, now, for years now -- their phrases like "weapons of mass destruction" that you and I never heard of growing up, "regime change," all the rest of it, "homeland," all the rest of the new language we've learned from this crowd that came in a few years ago -- around the late '90s, they started pushing this.

If their motive is not to fight weapons of mass destruction, which don't seem to materialize when they're supposed to in either Iraq or the Iranian case, what is the grand motive for war?

Why did we invade Iraq?

Why were we threatening World War III with Iran?

Why did this administration, Cheney and the president, keep pushing the war?

Why do they always want to fight or scare somebody?

What's it about if it's not weapons?

BIDEN: Let me tell you what I think it's about. I can't prove it. I think it's about our ability to try to dominate that region of the world and control oil.

I don't think we went to war because of oil, but I think there was an absolute belief -- the only thing I can fit together with Cheney and his gang is that they went to war -- they're smarter than they are acting. They're smarter than they are acting.

What they do -- they went to war in the hope that they would be able to do two things; one, have a government that sat on a whole bunch of oil, that still exists in the world...

MATTHEWS: Right.

BIDEN: ... that would be indebted to us.

MATTHEWS: Two, have permanent military bases in Iraq to dominate that part of the world, to be able to control oil, not to go steal it for American oil companies but be able to control the pricing, control the access of it -- a very Machiavellian view.

There's nothing idealistic about Cheney. I don't know what President Bush thinks, but I think he's bought, hook, line, and sinker, the Cheney rationale that the only way for us to be able to be dominant in the 21st century is to use our overwhelming power, in the face of the moral disapprobation of the rest of the world, to threaten the rest of the world, and that's how we'd avoid war in the future.

I think these guys are irresponsible. But the thing that angers me the most -- and it angers me, Chris -- is how incomprehensible it is for anyone to think that the president did not know that his intelligence agencies didn't believe what he was saying.

I believe that's why these guys came out with, now, 16 American intelligence agencies uniting, saying, I'm not going to wear the jacket again on this one.

Bush Quote du Jour: "I did it once; I'll do it again."

This enigmatic quote was apparently passed, real-time, to National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley during Hadley's White House briefing this afternoon via -- who knows? -- mobile texting, a BlackBerry, cranial implants? Just kidding. It was probably a BlackBerry.
The Huffington Post, having missed the audio, understandably attributed it to Mr. Cheney:

QUESTION: Second question. When did the Vice President get briefed on this? Because he was warning of serious consequences just last month, too.

HADLEY: I've just got a note from him -- I did it once, I'll do it again.

But they printed a correction on being told that it was actually referring to the president's reaction, probably to the line by Hadley, found in this transcript from the News & Observer, that was followed by a question about the vice president which Hadley apparently wasn't paying attention to, as he was busy checking out the prez's text:

HADLEY: So again, as the President says many times, we're asking people to do hard things. We're asking people to put pressure on Iran, and it has consequences for their diplomacy, it has consequences for their companies doing business with Iran. People don't like to do that. So I'm sure some people will try and use this as an excuse or a pretext for flagging on the effort.

Our argument is, actually, it should be just the reverse, because we need to keep the halting of the nuclear weapons program in place; we need to achieve the suspension of the enrichment program; and the only way -- what this NIE says is that the best path to do that is to continue what we've been doing, which is diplomatic isolation, U.N. sanctions and other financial pressure, plus the option for negotiations.

QUESTION: Second question. When did the Vice President get briefed on this? Because he was warning of serious consequences just last month, too.

And of course, the occasion of Hadley's briefing was to react to the newly released NIE that reveals Iran halted their nuclear weapons program in 2003.

I wonder if that halting was possibly due to the very early successes in the Iraq war, such as the removal of Saddam, something they didn't want to see repeated in Iran. If we keep having all this "success" over there that we've been having lately, they might just change their minds again.