Startled White House staffers rushed yesterday to explain the discrepancies between the Administration's rhetoric over the last two years and the report of it's combined intelligence agencies, or the U.S. National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), on Iran. The report, which expresses the views of 16 branches of the intelligence community, states that Tehran stopped work on it's nuclear weapons program back in 2003, which, for the uninformed, was four years ago. However, as Administration aides were quick to point out, the wildly divergent views on Iran's capabilities had more to do with semantics than any real discrepancy.
National Security Adviser, Stephen Hadley, hurried to explain away the differences, saying, "You see, statements from Dick Cheney and George Bush saying Iran was moving full speed ahead in their quest to build a nuclear arsenal capable of destroying the entire known galaxy were not necessarily at odds with the intelligence communitie's view that Iran was no longer even trying to develop a bomb; in fact, they dovetail nicely. Look, we all know that you can't trust those sneaky Iranian guys, so if they say they're not building a bomb, then they must be building one, right? And if they go so far as to actually not build a bomb, then it stands to reason that they must be building a really big bomb, see? And since our combined intelligence agencies are now saying that they (the lying Iranians) haven't been building a bomb for four years, then they must be building the biggest bomb the world has ever even seen! Boy, we're really in trouble now and only George Bush can save us." Then, laughing manically and making a play gun out of his thumb and forefinger, Mr. Hadley rushed from the podium shouting 'BANG! BANG!'.
Also in response to the NIE report, The Bush Administration, ever quick to adjust to the ebb and flow of world affairs, has revised it's criteria for attacking Iran down from Iran actually possessing a bomb to Iranian President Ahmadinejad just being able to say the word nuclear more correctly than Mr. Bush, which ratchets up the crisis considerably, as this is expected to occur within days, if it hasn't already.
Still, White House officials warned Christmas shoppers against undue panic as they blithely searched for the best deals they could on Nintendo Wii's, flat screen TV's and Sony PS3's; shoppers obliged by responding, "Iran? Are we having trouble with Iran? I thought it was Iraq we were fighting. Oh, well. Hey, Wal Mart has a 48" flat panel at 60% off!"
Despite the growing lack of urgency regarding the burgeoning and ever dwindling Iranian Missile Crisis, President Bush has vowed to exhaust every diplomatic means available to diffuse the rush to war by aiming every weapon that the United States possesses at Tehran, planning massive bombing campaigns and calling pizzerias in the area around the United Nations and ordering three hundred large pepperonis with extra cheese to be delivered to the Iranian consulate, C.O.D..
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