"Czech newspapers are full of headlines saying there is no longer a need for missile defense. ... It is hard for complex arguments to win against simple headlines," said Tomas Klvana, according to the AP.

The administration has dispatched Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and others to try to allay European allies over the meaning of the report -- chiefly Russia, which already his highly suspicious of the U.S. missile program, and other top allies France, Germany and the U.K.

Israel -- constantly in the bull's eye of Iran's militaristic rhetoric -- was no more heartened by the report.

"We cannot allow ourselves to rest just because of an intelligence report from the other side of the Earth, even if it is from our greatest friend," Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak said Wednesday, according to the AP. A statement from Israeli President Simon Peres' office said intelligence assessments from around the world have later proved faulty -- but did not specifically mention the 2002 U.S. NIE on Iraq, which has since been almost entirely discredited.'

Regardless of whether or not the NIE is 'true' or not (and, frankly, NIE reports have been so wildly out before that why anyone still believes anything they say is a mystery) it reveals much more about the United States than Iran. What it reveals is giant fissures in what Marxists would call 'the ruling class' and what used to be called The Establishment. Bush's project relied on welding together disparate and indeed, opposed, political groups: the mainly secular, pro-Israel, philosophical neo-conservatives(Wolfowitz etc), the extremists of the (very non-secular) Religious Right (Bush himself), and the right wing of the 'paleo-conservatives' who didn't  care about God OR philosophy but cared a great deal about the national and economic interests of the United States (Rumsfeld, Cheney). But it also involved holding together the Pentagon, the White House and the CIA: again, different political groupings with very different aims and objectives. This 'coalition of the not-particularly-willing' held together as long as things were going well, as coalitions tend to do, but has now disintegrated.

First to go were the neo-conservatives. Their talk of Hegel and Strauss was always anathema to the 'man of the people' image Bush liked to project, but they were 'useful idiots' to get the intellectuals (like Christopher Hitchens) on side. But they were also prone to asking to awkwards questions (cf Fukuyama), so Wolfowitz was booted out.

Then went the paleos: again, their simplistic worldview (simply: Islamism=Communism, Iran=the Soviet Union) had become an embarassment. So out went Rumsfeld.

And now the rest of the 'coalition' is is breaking down.

'The latest National Intelligence Estimate on Iran was the final factor in a military equation that now appears to guarantee that there will be no war with Iran during the Bush Administration. It meshes with the views of the operational types at the Pentagon, who have steadfastly resisted the march to war led by some Administration hawks. The anti-war group was composed of Defense Secretary Robert Gates; Admiral Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs; and Admiral William Fallon, who oversees the U.S. forces that would have had to wage that war. In recent months, all have pushed back privately and publicly, on the wisdom of going to war with Tehran. Indeed, the Pentagon's intelligence units were instrumental in forming the NIE's conclusions.' (emphasis added).

And of course the CIA has never forgiven Bush for being blamed for the WMD fiasco. This is the long awaited stab in the back to the Bush administration.

And yet what has changed? Well not much, really. The British are pulling out of Basra, and so the fictional 'coalition' is now openly a fiction: it was not the United Nations, or the 'coalition' that invaded Iraq: it was the United States, and only the United States. But 'we' remain in Afghanistan, and the US remains in Iraq. War is postponed in Iran...for a bit. It will not be Bush that invades Iran. But it might well be Hilary Clinton, or whoever the Republican nominee is. What Glenn Greenwald calls the 'Lawless Surveillance State' remains in operation with results that can be seen here.

No politician is prepared to stand up and say that Iraq has been a disaster and that they are therefore taking the blame and resigning. No one is prepared to say that the way that the 'West' (a euphemism) has been carrying out its (sic) foreign policy has been a catastrophe for freedom and democracy. No one is prepared to say that Iraq was not a 'mistake' but, like Vietnam, the logical end conclusion of a certain way of looking at the world, and that, unless we change that way of looking at the world, there are only countless more Iraqs lying ahead.