relegator-in-chief

* via laura comes this in the NYT by david sanger and helene cooper, the 'official back-story' to the iran 'negotiations'. read. weep. it sounds as though the folks from Lincoln Group did the story boarding. i feel like tearing the article to shreds - but it's so absurd that i'd never finish. and i want to cry. and laugh. and punch someone really hard on the nose.

ok - i cant resist starting.

take this for example:

"A meeting (rice) had attended in Berlin days earlier with European foreign ministers had been a disaster, she reported, according to participants in the discussion. Iran was neatly exploiting divisions among the Europeans and Russia, and speeding ahead with its enrichment of uranium. The president grimaced, one aide recalled, interpreting the look as one of exasperation "that said, 'O.K., team, what's the answer?' ""

remember that this article is pure propaganda - no facts - and they still can't do any better than have the delegator-in-chief delegatin by grimacing, interpreted by someone as exasperation, interpreted to be a delegation of a question, which was to be answered collectively. sheesh.

and separately (aside from all the propaganda), there's this:

"At a private dinner on March 6 at the Watergate with Ms. Rice, Mr. Hadley and Sergey Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, Mr. Lavrov warned that Iran could do what North Korea did in 2003 — throw out inspectors and abandon the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. That would close the biggest window into Iran's program, making it hard to assess the country's bomb capability — the same issue that had led to huge errors in Iraq."

right. the lack of visibility into iraq was the problem. saddam kicked out all the inspectors. the problem was bad intelligence. every other country made the same mistake. yada. yada.