Neocons Devastated by Iran Intel Bombshell, But Don't Count Them Out Yet

Since the neoconservatives began to emerge as a political force in the mid-to-late 1970s, they have followed a consistent strategy of targeting the information flows inside the United States, paying particular attention to controlling the nation's intelligence analysts and purging independent thinking from the U.S. news media.

Those were the two key switching points that allowed the neocons to push out favorable information and suppress contrary facts to shape how Americans perceived reality. Thus, the neocons could guide the public on issues such as the severity of the Soviet threat in the late Cold War or the WMD danger from Iraq and Iran this decade.

That neoconservative strategy reached its zenith after the 9/11 attacks as the U.S. intelligence community and the Washington press corps caved under intense political pressure. Essentially, President George W. Bush and the neocons got to manipulate reality itself - and they used that power to scare the heck out of the American people.

Some grassroots resistance emerged to challenge these faux realities, but it didn't gain much traction on the national level until Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans in late summer 2005 and Bush couldn't spin his administration's incompetent response.

Since then, the struggle has been up and down. Public revulsion over Bush's arrogance and the neocons' bloody fiasco in Iraq led to the Republican congressional defeat in 2006. But the Democrats then frittered away their advantage with a feckless approach on Iraq troop withdrawals and a failure to mount sustained investigations of administration wrongdoing.

Then, in fall 2007, Bush and the neocons sold the Iraq War "surge" as a great success, even though the result appears to be an open-ended U.S. military occupation of a hostile Arab country with one or two American soldiers and scores of Iraqis still dying each day.

Nevertheless, the neocons were again beating their chests and baiting their opponents as defeatists who want to undermine the troops.

Surprising Intel

But the neocons were dealt an unexpected body blow with the Dec. 3 release of a stunning U.S. intelligence assessment that Iran had halted its nuclear weapons program four years ago, a finding that contradicted Bush's belligerent rhetoric about Iran's nukes possibly provoking "World War III."

The National Intelligence Estimate knocked the wind out of the neocons' hope for a military confrontation with Iran before the end of Bush's term.

At a Dec. 4 press conference, Bush was left sputtering an unpersuasive claim that his warning about "World War III" on Oct. 17 was uttered while his intelligence advisers were keeping him in the dark about the new information that supported the NIE.

On Dec. 5, Bush tried to regain his political balance by blaming Iran for the doubts about its nuclear program.

"The Iranians have a strategic choice to make," Bush said in Omaha, Nebraska. "They can come clean with the international community about the scope of their nuclear activities and fully accept the longstanding offer to suspend their enrichment program and come to the table and negotiate, or they can continue on a path of isolation that is not in the best interest of the Iranian people. The choice is up to the Iranian regime."

Still, the NIE represented a declaration of independence by professional U.S. intelligence analysts who had been bullied by the neocons over the past three decades and especially during the run-up to the war with Iraq. [For the fullest account of this history, see Robert Parry's Secrecy & Privilege and Neck Deep.]

Campaign 2008

Though Bush and the neocons again find themselves on the defensive, the political battle is far from over. The neocons retain extraordinary strength within the U.S. news media as well as in the leading Washington think tanks and inside many of the presidential campaigns.