US intelligence czar John Negroponte told an audience at the National Press Club Thursday that Iran is years away from obtaining nuclear weapons. Tuesday, US military czar Donald Rumsfeld told right-wing talk show host Laura Ingraham that he doesn’t trust US intelligence estimates on Iran’s nuclear program. Today, US presidenting czar George W. Bush skirted the issue entirely to remind Americans once again that we invaded Iraq and exposed that country’s citizens to horrific violence from terrorists and others “so we do not have to face them here at home.”

Bush also said that in coming days he would spend time talking with Americans about “the character of our Nation.” We guess he won’t directly discuss the aspect of it that accommodates throwing Iraqis en masse into the volcano to appease the terrorism gods.

Negroponte’s Press Club comments describing Iran’s nuclear program as troublesome but not immediately threatening were sandwiched between Rumsfeld’s Ingraham love-in and threatening noises from various state department officials who paint the situation as dire and warn that the US is prepared to go around the UN security council to deal with Iran if necessary.

Deputy secretary of state Nicholas Burns told reporters that if Russia and China wouldn’t support UN sanctions against Iran, the US would form alliances with other nations willing to do the heavy lifting necessary to precipitate another war, while Robert Joseph, who replaced UN ambassador John Bolton as the state department’s point man on undermining international arms control efforts, chimed in to emphasize the threat.

Joining Burns at the news conference yesterday, Robert Joseph, the State Department’s arms control chief, sought to underscore a sense of urgency. He said the Iranians “have put both feet on the accelerator” toward developing nuclear weapons. He expressed particular concern that Iran’s announcement about enriched uranium signals that it is acquiring the capability of running centrifuges over a sustained period of time.

“We are very close to that point of no return,” which will enable Iran to make nuclear weapons, Joseph said.

Hovering over the proceedings was the ghost of Tony Blair, which refuses to blanch in the face of another hideously stupid war and the opposition to it from within his own government.

How significant is Negroponte’s apparent departure from the party line on Iran? Who knows. It’s unusual to see a top Bush administration official drift that far off message, and Negroponte isn’t a Paul O’Neill style outsider; he shares the Rumpercheneywitz golem’s Iran-Contra heritage, and he was the administration’s first ambassador to Iraq, presumably reprising his role in Honduras as ambassador to the death squads. And not too long ago, he was leading the charge to implicate Iran in the Iraqi insurgency, a vital step in building the case for attacking Iran. So whether he’s a cooler head or has only been momentarily seduced by actual information remains to be seen.

Rumsfeld, on the other hand, is very much a known quantity, or at the least a known unknown. He’s worried about Saddamists in Iraq and intelligence on Iran that once again, apparently, refuses to conform to necessity.

The thought of that country being turned over to the Zarqawis of the world, the terrorists who behead people, and the Saddamists who fill up mass graves with hundreds of thousands of people and use the money and the oil money and the water money to breed terrorists and send them around the world to kill free people is just a terrible thought. We can’t let that happen.

We’ll leave parsing the distinctions between “the money,” the oil money” and “the water money” to a therapist (although if anyone knows who’s buying Iraq’s water — and for that matter, who’s selling it — we’d love to hear about it). It’s enough that Ingraham understood what he was talking about there, and again when he spoke about Iran.

I think [Iran is] a very difficult target for our intelligence community. They work hard at it and they’re fine people, but it’s a difficult thing to do. Our visibility into their circumstance is imperfect. I would add that if one is asked the question how long would it take them to do certain things totally, alone, on an indigenous basis without assistance from other countries you’d get one answer. If you said to them, if you said what if they were able to get ballistic missiles from North Korea, as they have, and what if they were able to acquire fissile material from somebody? How long would it take? I think you’d get a somewhat different answer.

Hmmm. Yarse.

At the end of the interview, Rumsfeld thanked Ingraham for her support, as well he should, and for her morale-boosting activities on behalf of the Pentagon.

SECRETARY RUMSFELD: Well, we sure appreciate it. I also want you to know how much I appreciate your going over to Iraq and spending so much time and reporting from over there and getting a first-hand look at things. You’re terrific to do that.

INGRAHAM: Well, I had the best time and I’m going back in October.

Something to look forward to.

Ingraham isn’t Rumsfeld’s only port in the storm these days: there’s Rusty Humphries, a radio talker previously unknown to us — Rumsfeld told him “we had plenty of plans for the post major combat operations” but the problem was Turkey’s refusal to serve as a launching pad for the invasion and that “an enemy has a brain” — and Bill Cunningham, both of whom offered Rumsfeld unqualified support against the onslaught of those nasty armchair generals. Rumsfeld told Cunningham that adjusted for deflation, the Pentagon had followed former army chief of staff Eric Shinseki’s estimate that several hundred thousand troops would be required to occupy Iraq.

The only issue that came up that I can recall was [Shinseki] was asked, pressed before a congressional committee, and asked how many troops he thought it would take in the post-war period, and he said about the same as it would take in conquering the country and replacing Saddam Hussein. They pressed him and said how many would that be, and he said several hundred thousand. Of course he was right, it did take roughly the same number in the post major combat operation period as it took in major combat operations, but the generals in charge had decided that they didn’t need more than 150,000 or 160,000 for major combat operations and that’s basically what they held onto in the post period.

In other words, Shinseki was saying that however many troops invaded were what would be required to secure and stabilize the country. The original plan called for 380,000 troops. At the time he spoke, the number was apparently still in the “several hundred thousand” ballpark. Had the force been pared down to a squad of motor pool mechanics, presumably Shinseki would have deemed that sufficient as well, according to Rumsfeld.

But enough of past glories. Our sermon for today is that Rumsfeld is fully on board with “the smoking gun could be a mushroom cloud” paradigm for Iran while the guy looking at the intelligence analysis says otherwise. Firesign Theater stalks the allergen-ridden halls of history.

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