About That “New and Improved” NIE on Iran
Yesterday I expressed skepticism about the new NIE on Iran’s nuclear intentions. A more thorough review of the released summary leaves me even more puzzled, and troubled. Not only does this document represent a complete 180 degree turn in our intelligence community’s consensus analysis and evaluation of Iran, but it gives no reason for the stunning change of heart… either that of the Iranian Mullahs or the analysts themselves.
The Wall Street Journal has noticed the same thing:
As recently as 2005, the consensus estimate of our spooks was that “Iran currently is determined to develop nuclear weapons” and do so “despite its international obligations and international pressure.” This was a “high confidence” judgment. The new NIE says Iran abandoned its nuclear program in 2003 “in response to increasing international scrutiny.” This too is a “high confidence” conclusion. One of the two conclusions is wrong, and casts considerable doubt on the entire process by which these “estimates"--the consensus of 16 intelligence bureaucracies--are conducted and accorded gospel status.
Our own “confidence” is not heightened by the fact that the NIE’s main authors include three former State Department officials with previous reputations as “hyper-partisan anti-Bush officials,” according to an intelligence source. They are Tom Fingar, formerly of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research; Vann Van Diepen, the National Intelligence Officer for WMD; and Kenneth Brill, the former U.S. Ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)…
No less odd is the NIE’s conclusion that Iran abandoned its nuclear weapons program in 2003 in response to “international pressure.” The only serious pressure we can recall from that year was the U.S. invasion of Iraq. At the time, an Iranian opposition group revealed the existence of a covert Iranian nuclear program to mill and enrich uranium and produce heavy water at sites previously unknown to U.S. intelligence. The Bush Administration’s response was to punt the issue to the Europeans, who in 2003 were just beginning years of fruitless diplomacy before the matter was turned over to the U.N. Security Council…
In any case, the real issue is not Iran’s nuclear weapons program, but its nuclear program, period. As the NIE acknowledges, Iran continues to enrich uranium on an industrial scale--that is, build the capability to make the fuel for a potential bomb. And it is doing so in open defiance of binding U.N. resolutions. No less a source than the IAEA recently confirmed that Iran already has blueprints to cast uranium in the shape of an atomic bomb core.
The U.S. also knows that Iran has extensive technical information on how to fit a warhead atop a ballistic missile. And there is considerable evidence that the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps has been developing the detonation devices needed to set off a nuclear explosion at the weapons testing facility in Parchin. Even assuming that Iran is not seeking a bomb right now, it is hardly reassuring that they are developing technologies that could bring them within a screw’s twist of one.
Mr. Bush’s efforts to further sanction Iran at the U.N. were stalled even before the NIE’s release. Those efforts will now be on life support. The NIE’s judgments also complicate Treasury’s efforts to persuade foreign companies to divest from Iran. Why should they lose out on lucrative business opportunities when even U.S. intelligence absolves the Iranians of evil intent? Calls by Democrats and their media friends to negotiate with Tehran “without preconditions” will surely grow louder.
The larger worry here is how little we seem to have learned from our previous intelligence failures. Over the course of a decade, our intelligence services badly underestimated Saddam’s nuclear ambitions, then overestimated them. Now they have done a 180-degree turn on Iran, and in such a way that will contribute to a complacency that will make it easier for Iran to build a weapon. Our intelligence services are supposed to inform the policies of elected officials, but increasingly their judgments seem to be setting policy. This is dangerous.
What’s missing in all the hoopla over the “new and improved NIE is any sort of specific explanation for what prompted the change, and why this newer version should be taken any more seriously than the last such assessment… or the earlier NIE on pre-war Iraq’s nuclear ambitions, which was apparently written by many of the same people who authored this new Iran report.
Its hardly a great national secret that both CIA and the State Department have been in all but open rebellion against the policies of the president, almost since his first inauguration. That fact alone, never mind the dire implications, should give any serious individual pause when considering this report.
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