Iran: The New Intel's Immense Implications

The public version of the new National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran's nuclear program (Iran: Nuclear Intentions and Capabilities, November 2007) has taken military action off the table for the remainder of the Bush Presidency, and undercut the U.S. push for stronger sanctions as well.  Because of the importance of this issue, LFTC provides a potpourri of original sources for readers to review.  Items are divided into the NIE's itself, the intelligence community's and national security adviser's statements on the release, additional facts extracted from press coverage, fuller press coverage, input from critics, and Israel's view.  At the end is my own Bottom Line.

The National Intelligence Estimate.  Based upon the public version, 9 pages out of the 140 - 150 pages contained in the classified version, the NIE, based upon information as of October 31, 2007, and representing the consensus view of 16 intelligence agencies within the federal government, reached the following key judgments (intel definitions of confidence levels in parentheses):

"High Confidence" ("high-quality" data + "solid judgment") that:

(a) In Fall 2003 Iran halted its nuclear weapons program.

(b) Iran's decision was driven by international pressure to stop.

(c) Iran will not be "technically capable" to create enough plutonium for a weapon before 2015.

(d) Iran has the "scientific, technical and industrial capacity eventually to produce a highly-enriched uranium (HEU) weapon" before "about" 2015.

(e) Iran has ongoing military and civilian R&D--"some of which would also be of limited use for nuclear weapons."

"Moderate to High Confidence"

(a) Iran does not have a nuclear weapon.

"Moderate Confidence" (data "credibly sourced" + "plausible")

(a) Iran's program, as of mid-2007, has not been restarted.

(b) Iran's halt is complete--of its entire weapons program.

(c) The earliest date Iran could produce enough HEU for a nuclear weapon is late 2009.

(d) Iran will be able to produce enough HEU in the 2010-2015 time frame for a nuclear weapon.

(e) Iran is unlikely to achieve a nuclear weapons capability before 2013, and might not do so by 2015.

(f) Convincing the Iranian leadership to abandon nukes would be "difficult."

(g) Iran probably would use "covert, undeclared" facilities to produce an HEU-weapon.

"Low Confidence" (""questionable credibility/plausibility" or "poorly corroborated" or "too fragmented" to make judgments)

(a) Iran has imported some fissile-grade weapons material.

One added nugget: "We do not have sufficient intelligence to judge confidently whether Tehran is willing to maintain the halt of its nuclear weapons program indefinitely while it weighs its options, or whether it will or already has set specific deadlines or criteria that will prompt it to restart the program." (Italics mine.)

Statements from Intelligence Community and White House. Here is the one-pager from the Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence (PDDNI) and a one-pager from the National Security Adviser (NSA), on behalf of the White House.  PDDNI Donald Kerr explained that the release, despite recent adoption of a general policy of not releasing portions of NIEs to the public, was done because the 2005 NIE whose findings this latest NIE now reverses, was released (in part) publicly.  NSA Stephen Hadley put the best administration face on the release, stating that it shows that international pressure is working and such pressure should now be turned up.

Additional Facts. This November 2007 NIE reverses a May 2005 NIE that concluded with "high confidence" that Iran was pursuing a nuclear weapons program. One former official stated "for a fact" that the NIE judgments "were all hedges" two months ago.  Since then Iran has disclosed additional documents.  The NIE used intercepts, one of which had a senior Iranian military official "specifically overheard complaining that the nuclear program had been shuttered years earlier."  More information came from a defector, a senior official, Ali Rez Asgari, who came over in February 2007.   Muhammad el-Baradei, chief of the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), who recently reported that Iran had 3,000 centrifuges in operation capable of producing HEU, but that the IAEA had been unable to determine if Iran's program was for electricity or for HEU weapons, said that the new NIE establishes that hawks in the U.S. gov't had been waging "a smear campaign" against him.

John Bolton, architect of the administration's Proliferation Security Initiative, noted that there is no assessment of the state of Iran's military program when suspended.  He told Fox News that it is "incredible" that President Bush learned of the new position barely before we did (he learned just last Wednesday, Nov. 28).  Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said: "The key judgments show that the intelligence community has learned its lessons from the Iraq debacle."

Press Coverage.  Here, from the New York Times, are the story, an assessment, (predictable) European backsliding, and the White House reaction.  Here is the Los Angeles Times story.  Here are the Washington Post story and analysis.  Here are the New York Sun story and analysis.  The Washington Times offers a front-pager.  The Washington Post carries Iran's reaction (jubilation, what else?), and supplements it with a "fact-checker" that replays hawkish candidate statements on Iran's nuclear program, beneath the NIE's money quote.  (I cannot resist pointing out one error made by the WP "fact-checker": They repeat John McCain's error, when he sang "Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb bomb Iran" last spring, of attributing authorship to the Beach Boys; in fact, the group that premiered the tune, in 1961,was the Regents--Wikipedia has the details.)

Critics.  Norman Podhoretz, who has called for bombing Iran to set back its nuclear program, harbors "dark suspicions" about the NIE.  Max Boot raises more questions that merit an answer.  A contrary view is posted at Commentary's blog homepage (where NP's & MB's comments are posted).  Nonpareil Iran maven Michael Ledeen notes that the track record of our intelligence agencies has hardly been stellar.

Israel. Israel, for its part, as reported by the Jerusalem Post, believes Iran has restarted its program, a belief shared by super-dove Defense Minister Ehud Barak, who offered Palestinians the Dream Deal they idiotically rejected at Camp David.  Senator Joe Lieberman (speakign the the U.S. but largely echoing Israel's view) pointed out on TV that Iran is going full-speed ahead on two of the three critical elements of a program: enriching uranium and building delivery systems.  Only--IF the NIE intel is accurate--actual weapons design is being slowed down.

Bottom Line. The only thing anyone should conclude with "high confidence" is that no one can reasonably have high confidence, or even medium confidence, in any intelligence assessment by our agencies, as to programs inside countries adept and concealment and deception, and deeply hostile to America.  This does not mean the NIE is wrong.  It may be right.  But we can have no real confidence that the intelligence community knows, one way or another, the sate and progress of Iran's nuclear effort.

Our intel has never successfully predicted development of a nuclear weapon capability by non-allied nations.  It missed the massive petrodollar funding of hatred of America and the West, funded by the Saudis, with whom we were supposed to have had a "special relationship"--special, indeed.  It missed the Iranian revolution that brought the mullahs to power in 1979.  It was surprised by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.  And it was twice wrong on the WMD intel in Iraq: It was stunned to find in the Spring of 1991, after the Gulf War, that Saddam was no more than one year away from acquiring a nuclear weapons capability; and it gave us the catastrophic WMD intel failure prior to Iraqi Freedom--when CIA chief George Tenet called that intel "a slam dunk."

There is also an apparent inconsistency in this report and its 2005 predecessor: the range for Iranian acquisition is the same: 2010 - 2015.  How can this be, if in between the two estimates the program was stopped?

Senator Rockefeller is simply wrong to say that the 2007 NIE shows the intelligence agencies learned the WMD lesson from Iraq--in his view, to avoid politically-driven conclusions.  The May 2005 NIE that this latest document reverses was given after David Kay, chief of the Iraq Survey Group, told the world in 2004 that "We were all wrong," after the July 2004 Senate Select Intelligence Committee report, and after the February 2005 Silberman-Robb Commission report, both of which, while exonerating the administration of politicizing intelligence, concluded that the WMD intel on Iraq was deeply flawed, thinly sourced, and thus a complete fiasco.

Thus, the May 2005 NIE was made with full knowledge of the debacle on Iraq, and with lessons surely learned then.  Critics who excoriated the CIA's abysmal failure on Iraq WMD are absurdly eager to take as gospel this latest, politically convenient, finding.  I can't recall any of these folks praising 43's intel reform as a shining success, which is implicit in their acceptance in toto of the new Iran intel.

Worse, Iran is one of the hardest countries about which to get human intelligence, a field that is our weakest link in intelligence gathering.  And the stated reason for releasing the report now doesn't fully convince.  This assessment was intended to influence the Presidential election season.  The intelligence community wants, I think, to inoculate itself against another Iraq fiasco.  By reversing itself on Iran, the issue of stopping Iran is effectively removed as a campaign issue, and the matter deferred to a new administration.  Most government bureaucrats are, even in the national security field, Democrats.  The new NIE helps whoever wins the Democratic nomination, by making a dovish stance towards Iran less politically costly to take, and, correspondingly, making a hawkish stance  politically more costly for the Republican nominee.  Within the Democratic race, Barack Obama has hit out at Hillary for her vote in favor of branding Iran's Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist organization (which, of course, it is).  Obama wants...(what else?) diplomacy.  Lost in all this, is that the "E" in MIE stands for estimate, not fact.  Don't expect anti-Bushies to notice this.

One certain consequence of this report is, that by making military action politically impossible for the U.S. during the remainder of Bush's term, that the administration that takes office in 2009 will face powerful countervailing incentives to taking action, without another 180-degree turn by the intelligence community, which is exceeding unlikely.  No Democrat would buck this, and perhaps no Republican, either.

Which increases the chance that Israel, whose intelligence community is: (a) far better than ours, especially as to developments in the Mideast (except in Iraq, where we are on the ground, collecting scads of intel); and (b) believes that Iran is far closer to crossing the nuclear threshold than we do, will take it upon itself to act.  Perhaps not under Ehud Olmert, who is too busy kowtowing to the Palestinians.  But in early 2009 Israel will choose a new government.  Stay tuned.