President Bush's amen corner in the conservative commentariat is apoplectic over the new National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran. After all, the report's conclusion that Tehran suspended its nuclear weapons program inn 2003 knocked the legs out from their "World War III" rhetoric. And as you'd expect, the same people who helped bring you the war in Iraq are now quick to claim CIA incompetence and conspiracies are behind the new assessment.
At the head of the list of the usual suspects, of course, is Norman Podhoretz. The neo-conservative icon made the case Monday that the new NIE is part of an anti-Bush cabal at the CIA. In his piece "Dark Suspicions About the NIE," summarized the significance of the report's findings and leveled an accusation about the motivations behind them:

"[The NIE] has just dealt a serious blow to the argument some of us have been making that Iran is intent on building nuclear weapons and that neither diplomacy nor sanctions can prevent it from succeeding...
...I entertain an even darker suspicion. It is that the intelligence community, which has for some years now been leaking material calculated to undermine George W. Bush, is doing it again. This time the purpose is to head off the possibility that the President may order air strikes on the Iranian nuclear installations."

Those air strikes have no bigger cheerleader than Podhoretz. Now an advisor to Rudy Giuliani, it is Podhoretz who helps provide the world war vision to both the current and would-be next GOP occupant of the White House. His latest pro-war screed from June, "The Case for Bombing Iran," is required reading in both the Bush and Giuliani camps. In his book World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism, Podhoretz argues that with the conflict against Al Qaeda, Iraq and Iran, Sunni and Shiite, and other Islamic foes real or imagined, the next world war is already underway. As he told Newsweek:

"I decided to join Giuliani's team because his view of the war - what I call World War IV - is very close to my own," Podhoretz tells NEWSWEEK. (World War III, in his view, was the cold war.) "And also because he has the qualities of a wartime leader, including a fighting spirit and a determination to win."

Podhoretz has plenty of company among the skeptics on the right. Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute, who denied his role in the Iraq war chorus he helped lead, scoffed at the "intelligence professionals" who produced the NIE document for the CIA. In his latest ragefest, "The Great Intelligence Scam," Ledeen lambasts the Agency for offering conclusions about Iran's nuclear ambitions unhappily different (for him) from its earlier 2005 assessment:

"Indeed, those 'intelligence professionals' were very happy to take off their analytical caps and gowns and put on their policy wigs...This sort of blatant unprofessionalism is as common in today's Washington as it is unworthy of a serious intel type, and I think it tells us a lot about the document itself."

Ledeen's friends at the National Review join him in the ranks of the "unbelievers." Michael Rubin plays the "blame Clinton" card, asking "If Iran was working on a nuclear weapons program until 2003, what does this say about U.S. policy in the late Clinton period and European engagement?" Victor Davis Hanson incredibly argues that the NIE presents a major quandary for Democrats, who must now acknowledge the wisdom of George W. Bush's Iraq war and its supposed elimination of two nuclear threats:

"The latest news from Iran about the supposed abandonment in 2003 of the effort to produce a Bomb - if even remotely accurate - presents somewhat of a dilemma for liberal Democrats. Are they now to suggest that Republicans have been warmongering over a nonexistent threat for partisan purposes?
After all, what critic would wish now to grant that one result of the 2003 war - aside from the real chance that Iraq can stabilize and function under the only consensual government in the region - might have been the elimination, for some time, of two growing and potentially nuclear threats to American security, quite apart from Saddam Hussein?"

Cognitive dissonance, of course, can be painful to watch. The mouthpieces of the right, confronted with an intelligence assessment so wildly at odds with their own preconceptions about the Iran of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, desperately cling to their "bomb Iran now" mantra. As for the NIE itself, at best, they claim, it was an exercise by CIA analysts hopelessly trying to "cover their derrieres" in the wake of the Iraq pre-war intelligence fiasco. At its worst, the NIE is a determined agency effort to undermine President Bush. Either way, its conclusions are tentative, made wobbly by self-acknowledged "gaps."
All of which suggests the United States may have both the time and the opportunity for a different approach towards Iran. That, of course, will not be forthcoming from President Bush and his allies. At his press conference this morning, President Bush made it clear that despite the NIE, his approach to and rhetoric towards Iran will continue unchanged:

REPORTER: Are you saying at no point while the rhetoric was escalating, as World War III was making it into conversation - at no point, nobody from your intelligence team or your administration was saying, Maybe you want to back it down a little bit?
BUSH: No - I've never - nobody ever told me that.