A new National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), entitled “Iran: Nuclear Intentions and Capabilities,” has just dealt a serious blow to the argument some of us have been making that Iran is intent on building nuclear weapons and that neither diplomacy nor sanctions can prevent it from succeeding. Thus, this latest NIE “judges with high confidence that in fall 2003 Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program”; it “judges with high confidence that the halt was directed primarily in response to increasing international scrutiny and pressure resulting from exposure of Iran’s previously undeclared nuclear work”; it “assesses with moderate confidence that Tehran had not restarted its nuclear weapons program as of mid-2007”; it assesses, also with only “moderate confidence that the halt to those activities represents a halt to Iran’s entire nuclear weapons program”; but even if not, it judges “with high confidence that Iran will not be technically capable of producing and reprocessing enough plutonium for a weapon before about 2015.”
These findings are startling, not least because in key respects they represent a 180-degree turn from the conclusions of the last NIE on Iran’s nuclear program. For that one, issued in May 2005, assessed “with high confidence that Iran currently is determined to develop nuclear weapons” and to press on “despite its international obligations and international pressure.”
In other words, a full two years after Iran supposedly called a halt to its nuclear program, the intelligence community was still as sure as it ever is about anything that Iran was determined to build a nuclear arsenal. Why then should we believe it when it now tells us, and with the same “high confidence,” that Iran had already called a halt to its nuclear-weapons program in 2003? Similarly with the intelligence community’s reversal on the effectiveness of international pressure. In 2005, the NIE was highly confident that international pressure had not lessened Iran’s determination to develop nuclear weapons, and yet now, in 2007, the intelligence community is just as confident that international pressure had already done the trick by 2003.
Question: What has occurred in the last 2 years that caused a 180 degree shift in our belief regarding Iran and nukes?
Max Boot
So at the end of this NIE you come away knowing not much more than when you started. Basically you are left with the knowledge that the Iranians are pursuing nuclear work that probably won’t result in a bomb in the next couple of years but that could produce a weapon sometime thereafter. And most of those key judgments are delivered with only “moderate confidence.” Given the intelligence community’s consistent track record of being wrong in the past, especially about other nations’ nuclear programs (the CIA has been surprised in the past by, among others, Iraq, North Korea, Libya, India, and Pakistan) that doesn’t inspire much, well, confidence.
The suspicion is growing that the CIA is now so politicized that its conclusions are totally worthless.
Gabe Schoenfeld is less suspicious:
As we know all too well, NIEs have been strikingly wrong in the past; the “slam-dunk” assessment issued on the eve of the second Gulf war that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction was built on a remarkably thin body of evidence, much of which turned out be false. The 2005 assessment warning of Iran’s active nuclear program, the intelligence community is now telling us, was also wrong.
But being mistaken, even disastrously mistaken, is one thing: producing an NIE with the naked purpose of undermining a President and foreclosing a policy option is another. Could this happen? It seems highly unlikely if for no other reason then that sixteen different government agencies are involved in the production of such documents, and the classified evidence on which NIEs are based is available for inspection and debate by senior policymakers.
From The Corner:
All the Different News That's Fit to Print [Seth Leibsohn]
The media, from what I can tell, have now at least three (maybe four) theories or reasons as to why the NIE has changed its position on Iran.
If you read the USA TODAY, it’s “News photos contributed to reassessment of Iran.”
If you read the Washington Post, it’s “intercepted calls between Iranian military commanders, that steadily chipped away at the earlier assessment.”
If you read the Washington Times, it is speculated that “a senior Iranian official, Ali Rez Asgari, defected to the West during a visit to Turkey in February and disclosed new information about the program.”
If you read the NYT, it’s “new information obtained from covert sources over the summer had led to a reassessment of the state of Iran’s nuclear program.”
Maybe it’s all of this, and the NIE used all of this intelligence in their new assessment. That would not be discouraging frankly. BUT if the media is going to be on attack for the administration getting so much wrong on Iran’s program, might they themselves find a uniform theory of their story line as to why the administration was so wrong? It’s one story after all.
How many papers do we have to read to get the story right?
And finally, does nobody want to pick up on VDH’s observation in “The Corner” that there is one obvious elephant in the room? If Iran shut its program down in the fall of 2003 MIGHT, MIGHT, MIGHT it have anything to do with it noticing that the US militarily took out its neighbor (another enemy of the U.S.) earlier that year for, among other things, having a concealed WMD program?
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