''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''
So spoke a White House aide in 2002, if the journalist Ron Suskind is to be believed.
George Bush - or those who prepare his lines - is trying to manufacture reality again. He has, so Newsweek reports, 'disowned' the recent National Intelligence Estimate and continues to maintain that Iran "were a threat, they are a threat, and they will be a threat if we don't work together to stop their enrichment."
Tellingly, I think, Bush has distanced himself from the NIE, stating that he "defended our intelligence services, but made it clear that they're an independent agency; that they come to conclusions separate from what [he] may or may not want". It raises an interesting question that Bush, or any other leader, should "want" any conclusion at all from their intelligence services. Surely, that would suggest that they might be hoping to use intelligence findings to support rather than shape a policy? Surely not.
Nevertheless, we should all be worried. The intelligence agencies, perhaps still smarting from being traduced so roundly after the Iraq debacle and perhaps even desperate to prevent the US from blundering into another disaster, took measures to prevent their work being cherry-picked as it had been in 2002/03. Yet the White House appears intent on ignoring them and doubtless manufacturing a new pretext for bombing. The best hope, so far, is that other arms of the US Government will curb the crazies but this cannot be relied upon.
What is really needed is action from the US people -the only people who really matter in all of this. We can rely on journalists to study -and applaud- while the White House continues to make its own reality. The rest of us cannot afford to do the same.
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