Obama Gets a Foreign Policy Clue?

Well, well what do we have here? Apparently the new NIE people are out and have come to realize their error. You see, two years ago we put up with a lot of BS, some of it tangentially supported here by A. Charles who has mysteriously vanished, that all of the evidence was in and that Iran should be trusted not to be pursuing nukes, and that a substantial change in attitude was necessary in US foreign policy towards Iran. In other words, Iran hawks be damned, Bush is an idiot. 

Over at Belmont the news lies this way:

The Obama administration is clearly going to great lengths to educate Congressional liberals and the public at large on the danger posed by Iran.  The point, presumably, is to dispose of the lefty canard that Iran is a fundamentally peaceful country caught in a security dilemma of American construct.  It also commits Obama to an aggressive (even if non-military) posture toward Iran, which is comforting to those of us who believe that we need a hardball, if nuanced, strategy for containing, deterring, and, if necessary, interdicting the Islamic Republic.
Procedurally, this episode is going to reinforce the view of conservatives that after Iraq, at least, the intelligence agencies undermined the Bush administration at each opportunity.  If there was “politicization” of intelligence during the Bush years, it cut against Bush policies more than it facilitated them.

If all this is going as Iowahawk claims, then some of my precience about Obama's potential will be vindicated. Funny that I finally find the post that I've been looking for the past month or so in which I talked specifically about Obama's capacity to be rational. Way back then, 4 months before Rev. Wright, I said:

There's an odd undercurrent in the argument against Obama for President. And it's true that he has made some stupid remarks on foreign policy, but that undercurrent pretends that he won't get smart fast.  

...

I'm not necessarily convinced that Obama is unreliable for politics as usual. I think that he is an original thinker and is ready to try new approaches, but that there's something conservative about him underneath the appeal that won't make certain mistakes.

Right about now, I'm wondering how long Obama is going to continue his role as chief BS artist. It clearly made Geithner look stupid. Oh, by the way here's the scoop on the one day delay on Geithner's presenation of our Dear Leader's Plan. Emmanuel and Axelrod recrafted the presentation, according to a guy on Bush's econ team, to make it look more different than what Bush had already been doing. The term he used was that Obama is spending too much time on 'product differentiation'. And of course it makes perfect sense, even without that particular insight, that if Obama's transition went so freaking well, that he couldn't have been changing that much - after all, what does anybody think Geithner's been doing all this time? 

Which reminds me. Where the hell is Austan Goolsbee? Did he completely discredit himself or what?