The White House campaign to stampede this nation into war, to smash Iran's nuclear facilities before she acquires the capability to build an atom bomb, has been derailed, probably for the duration of the Bush presidency.

And the Bush policy -- to leave the military option on the table while pressing China, Russia and NATO to back tougher sanctions in the Security Council -- has been torpedoed.

Who are the sappers of the Bush policy? The leaders of the 16 intelligence agencies Bush commands. For even as he was raising the specter of "nuclear holocaust" and "World War III," those 16 agencies downgraded and virtually dismissed the threat, by declaring that Iran suspended its drive for nuclear weapons -- in 2003.

To have the intelligence community make a public declaration that undermines the foreign policy of a president, even as it calls his credibility into question, is unprecedented.

Nor is that the only astonishing aspect of the new National Intelligence Estimate that flatly contradicts the 2005 NIE, which had concluded that Iran was plowing ahead toward a nuclear weapon.

For if the intelligence agencies were 100 percent wrong about Iraq's WMD, the casus belli of today's war, and they have been 100 percent wrong for four years about Iran's drive for nuclear weapons, how can we trust them? How can we rely on them in formulating policy?

And if we cannot trust our intelligence agencies to distinguish disinformation from truth, and if we have blundered horribly once into war and almost blundered a second time, how can we justify the Bush policy of pre-emptive strikes and preventive war?

Other questions arise.

What did the president know, and when did he know it?

Was Bush aware that Iran had abandoned its nuclear weapons program, years ago, when he was using his apocalyptic rhetoric about nuclear holocaust and World War III?

If so, that is indefensible.

And if the NIE is right today, why was it wrong again in 2005, two years after the intelligence community was wrong about Iraq's WMD? Why did it take us longer than World World II -- from 2003 to late 2007 -- to find out the truth about our putative enemy? Continued...