As one who has feared a U.S. attack on Iran, I am personally relieved that the relase of the new National Intelligence Estimate makes such prospects unlikely:
Political sources in Israel said Monday night that it appears that the Bush administration has lost the sense of urgency and determination to carry out a military strike against Iran in 2008. The same sources said that the United States is unlikely to strike Iran in 2008, and will make do with more severe sanctions against Tehran.
I’ll sleep better now. Even Bush’s latest red line has been crossed without consequences. Six weeks ago he said:
I’ve told people that if you’re interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them from have the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon.
Now the NIE asserts (pdf):
We assess with high confidence that Iran has the scientific, technical and industrial
capacity eventually to produce nuclear weapons if it decides to do so.
Let’s review the press reactions today which answer some questions about the NIE release I asked yesterday:
The new NIE claims that Iran has stopped its "nuclear weapon program" in 2003. Every press report repeats that line. Only the New York Times quotes the IAEA which has never found any hint for such a program in the first place:
“Despite repeated smear campaigns, the I.A.E.A. has stood its ground and concluded time and again that since 2002 there was no evidence of an undeclared nuclear weapons program in Iran,” a senior agency official said. “It also validates the assessment of the director general that what the I.A.E.A. inspectors have seen in Iran represented no imminent danger.”
…
Another official close to the agency said it was striking that the American assessment stated with certainty that Iran had a nuclear weapons program in the past, a conclusion the agency has never formally reached.
Cyrus Safdari at Iran Affairs puts it a bit harsher:
[T]he NIEs are hogwash. There is still no evidence of any nuclear weapons program in Iran; not today, not in 2003, not ever.
The wrong assertion of a Iranian nuclear weapon program up to 2003 may be some cover-your-ass tactic by the Intelligence Community, or it may be a preparation to reintroduce the "threat" when it is convinient.
In general all reports seem to accept the NIE’s general finding that there currently is no nuke program in Iran. Even Jonah Goldberg at the National Review Online concedes:
It seems to me one can have all of the usual caveats that come with both our intelligence agencies and The New York Times, and still agree that the bar for bombing Iran has not only not been met yet, but that it’s arguably moving farther away.
Quoted in the LA Times ultra hawk John Bolton seems to have given up:
Asked what effect the document might have on the debate within the Bush administration, Bolton said: "There really isn’t any debate. Secretary Rice and Secretary Gates have fundamentally won. This is an NIE very conveniently teed up for what the administration has been doing."
There are a few holdouts though. A Weakly Standard blog entry has: Five Questions Concerning the Latest NIE and in a Guardian comment neocon Oliver Kamm has a hilarious argument on why all thought of a peaceful Iran is A dangerous fantasy.
So the neocons ain’t dead. The NIE finding may be the very reason why Wolfowitz is put into position as chairman of the International Security Advisory Board:
The 18-member panel, which has access to highly classified intelligence, advises Rice on disarmament, nuclear proliferation, WMD issues and other matters. "We think he is well suited and will do an excellent job," said one senior official.
A second chance for Team B?
The Israelis are miffed and try to keep up their war mongering. The Jerusalem Post relays Ehud Barak:
Iran is continuing in its efforts to produce a nuclear bomb, Defense Minister Ehud Barak said on Tuesday morning, ..
…
According to the defense minister, Iran had indeed stopped its program four years ago but has since renewed it.
Barak’s evidence? Nothing!
There are several theories why the new NIE has 180 degree different finding from the 2005 NIE.
The Washington Post writes:
Senior officials said the latest conclusions grew out of a stream of information, beginning with a set of Iranian drawings obtained in 2004 and ending with the intercepted calls between Iranian military commanders, that steadily chipped away at the earlier assessment.
In one intercept, a senior Iranian military official was specifically overheard complaining that the nuclear program had been shuttered years earlier, according to a source familiar with the intelligence. The intercept was one of more than 1,000 pieces of information cited in footnotes to the 150-page classified version of the document, an official said.
That reminds a bit of the intercepts Colin Powell quoted and played in front of the UN, ‘proving’ that Iraq had WMDs. The New York Times has a different angle:
In the summer of 2005, senior American intelligence officials began traveling the world with a secret slide show drawn from thousands of pages that they said were downloaded from a stolen Iranian laptop computer, trying to prove that Iran was lying when it said it had no interest in building a nuclear weapon.
…
Now, that assertion has been thrown into doubt by a surprising reversal: the conclusion, contained in the declassified summary of a new National Intelligence Estimate on Iran’s nuclear programs, that Iran’s effort to master the technology of building a nuclear weapon had halted two years before those briefings.At the time of the laptop slide show, some European and United Nations officials questioned what they were being shown. “I can fabricate that data,” one said at the time. “It looks beautiful, but it is open to doubt.”
When this mysterious all-telling laptop was first revealed in early 2006, I immediately mocked its alleged importance. The Laptop came to the CIA via the MEK, the Iran opposing terror-cult that is under the protection of the neocons. The CIA never revealed The Laptop’s content to the IAEA. I believe that The Laptop was the base for the earlier findings. Maybe the Intelligence Community now finally agreed with me that its value and provinence is the same as the forged Nigeran letters ‘proving’ Iraqi yellowcake purchase.
McClatchy explains why the NIE was published at all.
The Democratic-controlled Congress ordered the production of the NIE amid concerns that the Bush administration was hyping the threat as it had in Iraq.
…
In the end, said the [State Department] official, it was decided that if the unclassified summary wasn’t made public, that would increase the chances that classified parts of the document might leak. If that were to happen, the administration would be accused of suppressing intelligence that found that Iran’s nuclear program wasn’t as immediate a threat as the White House had suggested.
Timing:
Best expressed by Peter Baker and Robin Wright in WaPo. Short version: "Bush lied":
President Bush got the world’s attention this fall when he warned that a nuclear-armed Iran might lead to World War III. But his stark warning came at least a month or two after he had first been told about fresh indications that Iran had actually halted its nuclear weapons program.
…
Hadley said Bush was first told in August or September about intelligence indicating Iran had halted its weapons program, but was advised it would take time to evaluate. Vice President Cheney, Hadley and other top officials were briefed the week before last. Intelligence officials formalized their conclusions on Tuesday and briefed Bush the next day.
The U.S. congress should be concerned. Why was Israel informed of the new NIE before the Senators and Representatives found out about it? Haaretz:
The report, which discounted the likelihood that Iran is on a path to develop nuclear weapons soon, did not catch the Israeli leadership by surprise. During their visit to Washington last week, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and Defense Minister Ehud Barak were briefed on the report.
If I were a Chinese or European diplomat I would be pissed. There were negotiations over new sanctions on Sunday, without the NIE findings revealed to them:
A senior US official said on Monday that Russia and China were "constructive" when they were discussing at the weekend with the United States, Britain, France and Germany to impose new sanctions against Iran over its disputed nuclear program.
A few hours later Burn’s success in working for new sanctions is down the gully: Now China opposes more Iran sanctions and European officials are embarrassed:
[They] added that they were struggling to understand why the United States chose to issue the report just two days after the six powers involved in negotiating with Iran — the United States, Russia, China, France, Britain and Germany — had decided to press ahead with a new Security Council resolution.
“Officially, we will study the document carefully; unofficially, our efforts to build up momentum for another resolution are gone,” said one European official involved in the diplomacy.
Another senior European official called the conclusions of the assessment “unfathomable.”
As McClachy correctly states:
[The declassified key judgments] deal another blow to the administration’s credibility and influence, already battered by its use of bogus and exaggerated intelligence to justify its 2003 invasion of Iraq.
No wonder then that Iran welcomes [the] US atomic report.
There is currently a Gulf Cooperation Council meeting (the six Arab Gulf states) to which, for the first time ever, Iran was invited. GCC leaders host Ahmadinejad at summit
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Monday offered to sign a security pact with Gulf Arab leaders as he became the first president from the Islamic republic to be invited to their annual summit.
The pact Ahmedinejad propsed would include civil nuclear cooperation (btw: Bush will love this picture)
Earlier the Crown Prince of Bahrein, Sheik Salman bin Isa al-Khalifa, had accused Iran to deceive about a nuclear weapons program. With the new NIE, Bahrain, where the GCC meets, is embarressed and the issue will be off the table. One now can expect that there will further talks on integrating Iran into the GCC.
Additionally the GCC countries agreed to implement a common market and a common currency by 2010. This is another severe blow to the US Dollar. As the most ugly issue now has vanished, maybe Iran could join that currency union too?
That would be the most positive and consequential issue the NIE release probably achieved.