What particularly concerns Gulf Arabs is the possibility that Iran could go nuclear–a concern unlikely to be erased by the ambiguous findings of the new NIE. While this NIE claims that Iran stopped its nuclear-weapons program in 2003 (in direct contradiction to an NIE finding issued just two years ago that “Iran currently is determined to develop nuclear weapons”), it concedes that “Iran’s civilian uranium enrichment program is continuing.” Such a “civilian” program could be converted speedily and stealthily to military use. As the new NIE notes, “Iran has the scientific, technical, and industrial capacity to produce nuclear weapons if it decides to do so.”That thought fills Sunni Arabs with dread. “If we accept Iran as a nuclear power that is like accepting Hitler in 1933-34,” warned one senior Arab official, using the kind of analogy that back in Washington would get him dismissed as a neocon warmonger.
Ynet:
“The manner in which the Americans relate to the intelligence report on Iran is similar to the way in which they viewed those reports they received during the Holocaust on railways transporting hundreds of thousands of Jews to their death at Auschwitz,” Minister Yitzhak Cohen of Shas said during a security cabinet meeting Sunday morning on the Iranian nuclear issue.
(via memeorandum)I don’t believe, as John Bolton does, that the NIE is a “quasi-putsch.”
“This is politics disguised as intelligence,” Bolton was quoted as saying in an article appearing in this week’s edition.Bolton described the report, released Monday, as a “quasi-putsch” by the intelligence agencies, Der Spiegel said.
(via memeorandum)
The NIE is an estimate. It reflects the uncertainty involved in processing intelligence. I can believe that there are uncertainties about whether the Iranians have resumed producing fuel for a nuclear explosive. The problem is not with the NIE but with the way it’s being spun.
Consider Max Boot’s observation above. Or consider this:
British spy chiefs have grave doubts that Iran has mothballed its nuclear weapons programme, as a US intelligence report claimed last week, and believe the CIA has been hoodwinked by Teheran.The timing of the CIA report has also provoked fury in the British Government, where officials believe it has undermined efforts to impose tough new sanctions on Iran and made an Israeli attack on its nuclear facilities more likely.
The security services in London want concrete evidence to allay concerns that the Islamic state has fed disinformation to the CIA.
The report used new evidence – including human sources, wireless intercepts and evidence from an Iranian defector – to conclude that Teheran suspended the bomb-making side of its nuclear programme in 2003. But British intelligence is concerned that US spy chiefs were so determined to avoid giving President Bush a reason to go to war – as their reports on Saddam Hussein’s weapons programmes did in Iraq – that they got it wrong this time.
(via memeorandum)
The latest NIE reflects caution – perhaps excessive caution – in evaluating the Iranian threat. But again the problem isn’t in the NIE. The problem is in the reporting. Suppose that the Telegraph found that British intelligence had confirmed the doubts of the NIE would American newspapers have been reticent to play that up? The Telegraph also quotes favored news source Bruce Reidel critical of the NIE. If Reidel took the opposite view, you can be sure he’d be quoted in the NY Times or Washington Post.
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates made an astute observation about Iran
Mr. Gates mocked Iran’s praise of a new National Intelligence Estimate as a “watershed†— the first time Tehran has accepted the conclusions of American spy agencies. As the audience chuckled, Mr. Gates said Iran’s approval of the American intelligence estimate required it to accept other assessments of its behavior.“Since that government now acknowledges the quality of American intelligence assessments,†Mr. Gates said, “I assume that it will also embrace as valid American intelligence assessments of its funding and training of militia groups in Iraq, its deployment of lethal weapons and technology to both Iraq and Afghanistan, its ongoing support of terrorist organizations like Hezbollah and Hamas that have murdered thousands of innocent civilians and its continued research and development of medium-range ballistic missiles that are not particularly cost-effective unless equipped with warheads carrying weapons of mass destruction.â€
The selectivity that Gates mocks, is the similar to what we see in the media. The skepticism or hostility to President Bush is such that the media will not provide us with any information that may cast the president in a positive light.
Still the immediate effect of the NIE is that politically, military action against Iran is off the table. President Bush seems to believe that. Barring any dramatic new intelligence, the administration will continue trying to keep Iran nuclear weapon free using diplomacy.
Charles Krauthammer writes even though the conclusion of the NIE appears positive there’s no reason to draw conclusions that some have been drawing from it.
Which is why the critics’ claim that this NIE report is a mandate for a new and soft Iranian policy is wrong. John Edwards immediately said the report justified his vote against designating the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organization and imposing sanctions on it. But the NIE’s major conclusion is that Iran calibrates its nuclear efforts–including the suspension of the weaponization part–in a real-world cost-benefit reaction to outside pressure. It makes the case precisely for sanctions.Moreover, the critics seem not to have noticed when uranium enrichment and weaponization were halted: fall 2003–before the rise of the Iraqi insurgency and while the shock and awe of the U.S.’s three-week conquest of Baghdad was still reverberating throughout the Middle East, scaring WMD pursuers, like Gaddafi’s Libya, into giving up their nuclear programs altogether. Timing suggests that the American military option exercised in Iraq contributed to Iran’s suspension of weaponization.
The military option may not be necessary right now. If weaponization has been suspended, the window for sanctions has been widened. But there is no reasonable argument for taking military action off the table. If the Iranians refuse to negotiate seriously–their new negotiator says all previous negotiations are void and talks now return to square one–the military option needs to be on the table and in plain view.
It appears that President Bush has, for now, taken military action off the agenda based on the NIE, something that Krauthammer would disagree with. However among President Bush’s critics much too much confidence was misplace into the NIE.
Crossposted on Soccer Dad.
