Oh, for the days when the need to parse presidential language was only a matter of distinguishing one kind of sex act from another. Today it’s a key part of monitoring foreign policy debates and keeping the president from starting wars, bamboozling the country and causing untold numbers of deaths.

The details are still sketchy. But we appear now to know that the Iranians shuttered their nuclear weapons program in 2003. The new Iran National Intelligence Estimate saying so was only released this week. But according to published reports, the president was first told about the new and disconfirming evidence as far back as July. The new intelligence became progressively more clear into the fall. But it’s clear that the intelligence community knew back in the summer that they might need to radically recalculate their analysis. And yet here was the president, through most of the fall, escalating his rhetoric against Iran and rattling the sabers for a potential military confrontation.

Most damning, of course, is that the president — apparently for the second time — continued to beat the drums for war, and even escalate the rhetoric, even as he was receiving new intelligence that the purported rationale for such war might not even exist.

But there’s also something else to look at. If you look closely at what the president said in mid-October, it seems he may actually have subtly changed his rhetoric to take into account the new intel he knew was coming down the pike, though in a way few were likely to notice.

If you go back to his Oct. 17 press conference, the one where he spoke of “World War III,” he changes his wording. It’s no longer the need to prevent the Iranians from getting the bomb. Now it’s the necessity of “preventing them from hav[ing] the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon” (my italics).

That’s the tell.

This change is no accident. Bush wants claims that will survive the eventual revelation of this new intelligence — while also continuing to hype the imminence of the Iranian nuclear threat that his spy chiefs are telling him likely does not exist.

Of course, the president also wants us to think that he only found out this week about the new intelligence on the shuttered Iranian nuclear program. So how does he square that with the reports in The Washington Post and other papers that he was actually first briefed on it back in July and August?

If you look at the president’s comments on Tuesday, he claims that Mike McConnell came to him and said, “Mr. President, we’ve got some important new information on the Iran nuclear front.” And the president says, OK. But he doesn’t ask him what the information is.

“He didn’t tell me what the information was,” are the president’s own words. I don’t know if McConnell is being set up here for a replay of George Tenet’s “slam dunk” comment. But are we really supposed to believe this? President Bush has defined Iran as the pre-eminent foreign-policy challenge the United States faces today, with its nuclear program as our focal point of concern. For the president, even our continued involvement in Iraq today is justified in large part by the necessity of containing Iran. And the president’s spy chief comes to him with major new intelligence on Iran and he doesn’t ask what it is?

That’s simply not credible, just like most of the rest of the president’s rhetoric and actions on Iran. At the moment this story is being treated simply as an embarrassment for the White House, with new intel that undermines their claim that Iran presents an imminent threat to the U.S. and its allies. But before this is over we’ll see that it’s very like the fibbing and fakery that led up to the Iraq war. Only this time, Democrats have subpoena power to get to the bottom of it.

Marshall is editor of talkingpointsmemo.com.  His column appears in The Hill each week.
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