The Iran NIE starts with this (pdf):
We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons
program
The above sentence has two chunks of information. One, Iran has no current nuclear weapon program, was greated with great relief, including by me, as it makes an attack on Iran during Bush’s remaining reign unlikely. That chunk, which we are happy about, induces us to trust the second chunk and the whole NIE. We want to believe in this.
But by swallowing that chunk we are pressed to also automatically swallow the other part: the assertion that Iran really had a nuclear weapons program up to 2003.
As Chris Floyd notes:
By accepting the NIE report uncritically — because part of it does indeed reveal that the Bushists have been lying about the Iranian threat for years — they inadvertantly (or willingly) buy into the report’s underlying assumption: that Iran really was building a bomb all these years, and only stopped because big bad Bush rolled into Baghdad and put the fear of God into them. Thus the report can be seen as accepting a bit of short-lived bad PR — "NIE Report Muddies the Water in Administration Stance on Iran," etc. (and that’s as bad as it would ever get with the corporate media) — in exchange for "confirmation" of the Regime’s basic contention (the dire threat posed by Iran) and another "justification" of the war crime in Iraq.
The 2005 NIE was not at all sure about the existence of a nuclear weapon program in Iran. As Dafna Linzer wrote back in 2005 about that now old NIE:
The new National Intelligence Estimate includes what the intelligence community views as credible indicators that Iran’s military is conducting clandestine work. But the sources said there is no information linking those projects directly to a nuclear weapons program. What is clear is that Iran, mostly through its energy program, is acquiring and mastering technologies that could be diverted to bombmaking.
Did Iran hide stuff it should have disclosed? Yes it did. But one can understand this as Iran tried for a long time to acquire civil nuclear technology. All contracts Iran tried to make with the ‘west’ to this regard were broken under pressure from the U.S. At a point Iran decided that it would have to go clandestine to achieve something at all. By 2002 information about the clandestine efforts got out.
In 2003 the IAEA detailed (pdf) the issues Iran had hidden. All of these issues are explainable as parts of a civil nuclear program. Currently Iran and the IAEA have a work plan for clearing up the last IAEA questions on these issues. Iran is ‘coming clean’. The IAEA has never asserted that Iran had a military nuclear program and I expect it to certify that there has never been one sometime next year.
The only issue that would be open after that, is Iran’s adherence to the Additional Protocol of the NPT, which allows all over intrusive IAEA inspection. Iran voluntarily adhered to the protocol until its case was referred to the UN Security Council. If the Security Council hands the issue back to the IAEA, Iran is likely to agree to again allow intrusive inspections.
The IAEA has up to today not found ANY evidence for a nuclear weapon program in Iran. But the new NIE asserts this with "high confidence". Why can this be so?
Today’s NYT has some spin that tries to explain:
American intelligence agencies reversed their view about the status of Iran’s nuclear weapons program after they obtained notes last summer from the deliberations of Iranian military officials involved in the weapons development program, senior intelligence and government officials said on Wednesday.
The notes included conversations and deliberations in which some of the military officials complained bitterly about what they termed a decision by their superiors in late 2003 to shut down a complex engineering effort to design nuclear weapons, including a warhead that could fit atop Iranian missiles.
…
The officials said they were confident that the notes confirmed the existence, up to 2003, of a weapons programs that American officials first learned about from a laptop computer, belonging to an Iranian engineer, that came into the hands of the C.I.A. in 2004.
Ok – lets get the timeline straight: First came The Laptop, which I believe is forgery (emptywheel also wrote about The Laptop: 1, 2, 3 and 4), then the U.S. obtained some "notes".
Can you imagine high military folks in Iran writing "notes" in which they "bitterly complain" about government policies with regard to nukes? Wouldn’t that risk their immediate demotion or something much worse?
No way I’ll swallow that one.
If the U.S. has information on a Iranian weapon program it should give that to the IAEA so it can be verified. Unless the IAEA confirms this information, there is absolutely no reason to believe any of it.
That the U.S. is refusing to hand over its ‘information’ to the IAEA is simply an attempt to create new ‘issues’ and to make it impossible for Iran to defend itself against the accusations and the ‘secret evidence’.
For now a hot war with Iran is unlikely. But a warm war on Iran is already going on. This is economic warfare.
Like with Iraq after 1991, the U.S. is trying to degrade Iran’s economic capabilities through sanctions. It took 11 years to get Iraq so far down that it could not put up any resistance to the U.S. invasion. It will take longer with Iran, but the U.S. is trying hard.
When Bush declared the Al-Quds force, part of the Iranian military, a "terrorist organization" that was big news. But the steps really taken were not against the Al-Quds. The order Bush signed put the top three Iranian banks, Bank Melli, Bank Mellat and Bank Saderat, out of business with the "west".
Imagine Goldman-Sachs, Bank of America, and Citigroup being unable to conduct any foreign transaction. They wouldn’t survive long and the U.S. economy would be hit hard.
The U.S., both parties, want to keep these instruments in place: slow economic death or at least diminishing Iran’s capacities to a point where a future invasion becomes viable. The Carter doctrine is well alive.
The whole "nuclear issue" is only a device to achieve regime change and unrestricted hegemony of the U.S. over the Persian Gulf, its countries and oil.