Israel can beg to differ if they want. But our intl not only says that they don't have an active program, they say with "high confidence."
acording to the NIE, they stopped development in 2003. did anything else significant happen that year, and the previous fall, that might have convinced them to stop the program?
So which is it basso? Is the NIE correct and they've stopped it, or is it not? If it isn't correct then your Iraq war rationale doesn't work. If it is correct then the administration has been dishonest and intentionally hyped the threat of Iran. You are trying to have it both ways.
Wasn't Khan in Pakistan busted just about that time with selling secrets and technology to Iran? Yes, Iran's initial reaction to the war may have been to stop dead in their tracks with what they are doing. But, once they realized US forces were in Iraq for the foreseeable future and there is no way they could be stretched into another war with Iran, then Iran changed tact proceeding with the enrichment plan unabated with no enrichment freezes up for debate at talks on the matter. Now, the threat will always be "Iran could make a bomb because they can enrich" versus before...where we actually still had the leverage with the "threat of war" to prevent them from enriching. It actually gives them the upper hand than they would have if they actually had the bomb.
I do not believe a word that man says. I do believe in following closely what he does. One thing Bush can not do is launch an armed invasion into Iran, looking for WMD. Bush does not lack the will, just the troops.
I may sound overly optimistic here, but I firmly believe that this was the last 'death blow' to any lurking plans in D.C. to launch a military attack on Iran because of its nuclear program. They still can do it, just not for the WMD claims anymore. Here's a prediction: the next card we will trump Iran with will be on 'humanitarian' and 'terrorism-fighting' grounds. I think we will continue to make noise about the WMD but only to make sure that they do not pick up from where they left off in 2003 (according to our intel, that is). Don't want to sound like Kennan here, but 'containment' was and still remains to be the best option for dealing with Iranian belligerence. Obviously, Israel and some of our Arab allies can help. Perhaps more importantly, we need a client state in Iraq to help us do that (we have one now, but they aren't functional just yet). Good stuff...
James Taranto has a good take, quoting from a number of different sources: [rquoter]U.S. Goes Soft on Iran, Says U.N. So reports the New York Times: [rquoter] The International Atomic Energy Agency on Tuesday publicly embraced the new American intelligence assessment stating that Iran had halted its nuclear weapons effort, but in truth the agency is taking a more cautious approach in drawing conclusions about Iran's nuclear program. "To be frank, we are more skeptical," a senior official close to the agency said. "We don't buy the American analysis 100 percent. We are not that generous with Iran." The official called the American assertion that Iran had "halted" its weapons program in 2003 "somewhat surprising." That the nuclear watchdog agency based in Vienna is sounding a somewhat tougher line than the Bush administration is surprising, given that the administration has long criticized it for not pressuring Iran hard enough to curb its nuclear program.[/rquoter] The Times editorial on the subject is called "Good and Bad News About Iran." The good news first: [rquoter]President Bush has absolutely no excuse for going to war against Iran.[/rquoter] Now the bad news: [rquoter]First, the report says "with high confidence" that Iran did have a secret nuclear weapons program and that it stopped only after it got caught and was threatened with international punishment. Even now, Tehran's scientists are working to master the skills to make nuclear fuel -- the hardest part of building a weapon. Anyone who wants to give the Iranians the full benefit of the doubt should read the last four years of reports from United Nations' nuclear inspectors about Iran's 18-year history of hiding and dissembling. Or last month's report, which criticized Tehran for providing "diminishing" information and access to its current program. In one of those ironies that would be delicious if it didn't involve nuclear weapons, an official close to the inspection agency told The Times yesterday that the new American assessment might be too generous to Iran.[/rquoter] In other words, the bad news, per the Times, is that a lunatic theocracy may soon become a lunatic theocracy armed with nuclear weapons. The good news is that that there's nothing President Bush can do to stop it. Blogger Richard Belzer has a genuinely optimistic take. News reports that focus on the political implications of the report, he argues, "miss two crucial risk assessment lessons one can infer from the unclassified summary": [rquoter] 1. The change in judgment is the result of new information recently obtained; it is claimed not to be a recalibration of judgment based on the same body of information that was available when the NIE on Iran was last updated in 2005. 2. The Intelligence Community widely believes that this new information (whatever it is) is highly credible -so credible, in fact, that it overwhelms the IC's prior consensus judgment based on all other information in the intelligence database. The first of these inferences seems to be a good thing, for it suggests that the Intelligence Community remains confident of its 2005 judgment based on the information that was available in 2005. That is, the IC has not been swayed by the pressures of competing risk management constituencies that want to either exaggerate or downplay the data in order to support alternative policy views. The second of these inferences is unambiguously good news. It is a fundamental principle of risk analysis that it is always a good thing when new, high-quality information reduces uncertainty. The reduction of uncertainty is the best reason for performing research in the first place; if research fails to reduce uncertainty, then it has little or no value for decision-making.[/rquoter] But there's a big caveat: "It is possible that the new information is not as powerful as the NIE suggests and that the existence of this new information is being used to change prior judgment without admitting so. Similarly, it is possible that the group dynamics within the IC have changed since 2005." The Wall Street Journal reports in an editorial 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." So it could be that when the media and Democratic politicians treat the NIE as a political document, that is exactly what its authors intended. Israeli intelligence is much less sanguine about Iran's nuclear ambitions and capabilities, and in analyzing the reasons for the differences, the Jerusalem Post's Yaakov Katz points to some other factors that can bias interpretations of ambiguous information: [rquoter] Both countries are also influenced by different political agendas. The Americans, for example, are still traumatized by the blatant intelligence failure vis-à-vis Iraq's alleged WMD and, therefore, does not want to be caught crying wolf again. Israel, on the other hand, is traumatized by its failure to learn of Libya's nuclear program before it was abandoned in a deal Col. Muammar Gaddafi struck with the US and UK. As a result of these traumas, both countries interpret the situation a little differently. Israel takes the more stringent track. As one defense official put it on Tuesday, "It is better to be safe than sorry." However, in America, where there is an already-growing anti-war sentiment, the report is meant to send a message that the military option is, at least for now, off the table.[/rquoter] (Israel might have known about Libya's weapons before Katz says; a September 2002 Associated Press dispatch quotes then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon as saying, "Libya may be the first [Arab] country with weapons of mass destruction.") Page 5 of the NIE summary describes the terminology the intelligence community uses to indicate how much confidence it has in a finding: [rquoter]* High confidence generally indicates that our judgments are based on high-quality information, and/or that the nature of the issue makes it possible to render a solid judgment. A "high confidence" judgment is not a fact or a certainty, however, and such judgments still carry a risk of being wrong. * Moderate confidence generally means that the information is credibly sourced and plausible but not of sufficient quality or corroborated sufficiently to warrant a higher level of confidence. * Low confidence generally means that the information's credibility and/or plausibility is questionable, or that the information is too fragmented or poorly corroborated to make solid analytic inferences, or that we have significant concerns or problems with the sources.[/rquoter] At this point, we're inclined to give the NIE a "low confidence rating."[/rquoter]
Oh, basso. Watching you try to squirm yourself into a way to completely dismiss facts is actually getting kind of entertaining, though still frustrating. Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead. The article manages to pull out all the stops. They twist words to come to the unspoken conclusion that 'the New York Times hates America'. They come with alternative counter-sources that have limited credibility. The even resort to making fun of the language of the NIE. I especially like character assassinations on the authors. Since the authors only collate what the various agencies are telling them it is a total and complete red herring. But it’s a nice distraction anyway. Look at the silly monkey. <object width="425" height="355"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/KVunOhF3EUQ&rel=1"></param><param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/KVunOhF3EUQ&rel=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="355"></embed></object> And since we know that the report was championed by Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence appointed by Bush, I guess we can lock him in as a long time Bush hater too? Was he pretending to like Bush so he could be appointed by the President and take the administration down from within? The horror. When are you planning to initiate treason hearings? If you don't like the message, kill the messenger. This is the same mistake they made in Iraq. (see Plame, Valarie) I would have thought someone would have learned something from that mistake, but I guess not? [rquoter] We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. -White House Aide [/rquoter]
via TPM -- That Your Final Answer, Mr. Bush? Since the release of the new Iran NIE on Monday, we've been debating just when the president and his key advisors know the basic gist of what the new report would show. Take them at their own word and they really didn't know anything until just this last week. As soon as they knew, we knew, they would say. Sure Mike McConnell mentioned something to the president back in August. But he had no way of knowing that this "new information" would dramatically undermine the claim that Iran was on the brink of going nuclear. And as the president said yesterday, "He didn't tell me what the information was." Yet I'm hearing from a lot of directions that the basic gist of the report -- that the Iranians aren't nearly as close to going nuclear as we'd been led to believe -- has been circulating at least in intelligence circles for some time. In other words, this NIE has been sitting either literally or figuratively on the president's desk for months. Now, along those lines look at this September 22nd post from a site called Swoop, which I hear is put together by some pretty knowledgeable DC insiders. Just one blog post, definitely. But the key point is right there: word was out that the NIE deliver the goods for the Iranian bomb enthusiasts, that the "WMD argument" for war would not "gain traction from the IC (i.e., Intelligence Community)." What it all comes down to is what the president says he didn't know about until the beginning of December was already being chatted about on insider national security blogs back in September. Does anybody still believe he hasn't known this for months? --Josh Marshall http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/
Again, basso which way is it? Did Bush's invasion of Iraq convince Iran to halt its program, thus the NIE is correct, or is the NIE wrong and we all need to be quaking in our boots as the administration has been saying.
man... talk about egg of the face of this administration. must hurt to get kicked in the nuts. take a deep breath and walk it off. now if we can get the iranians to the bargaining table and get them to be more transparent about their program. however, this administration has lost pretty much all credibility within the international community. the next president has his/her work cut out for him/her
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/05/AR2007120502234.html [rquoter] The Flaws In the Iran Report By John R. Bolton Thursday, December 6, 2007; A29 Rarely has a document from the supposedly hidden world of intelligence had such an impact as the National Intelligence Estimate released this week. Rarely has an administration been so unprepared for such an event. And rarely have vehement critics of the "intelligence community" on issues such as Iraq's weapons of mass destruction reversed themselves so quickly. All this shows that we not only have a problem interpreting what the mullahs in Tehran are up to, but also a more fundamental problem: Too much of the intelligence community is engaging in policy formulation rather than "intelligence" analysis, and too many in Congress and the media are happy about it. President Bush may not be able to repair his Iran policy (which was not rigorous enough to begin with) in his last year, but he would leave a lasting legacy by returning the intelligence world to its proper function. Consider these flaws in the NIE's "key judgments," which were made public even though approximately 140 pages of analysis, and reams of underlying intelligence, remain classified. First, the headline finding -- that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 -- is written in a way that guarantees the totality of the conclusions will be misread. In fact, there is little substantive difference between the conclusions of the 2005 NIE on Iran's nuclear capabilities and the 2007 NIE. Moreover, the distinction between "military" and "civilian" programs is highly artificial, since the enrichment of uranium, which all agree Iran is continuing, is critical to civilian and military uses. Indeed, it has always been Iran's "civilian" program that posed the main risk of a nuclear "breakout." The real differences between the NIEs are not in the hard data but in the psychological assessment of the mullahs' motives and objectives. The current NIE freely admits to having only moderate confidence that the suspension continues and says that there are significant gaps in our intelligence and that our analysts dissent from their initial judgment on suspension. This alone should give us considerable pause. Second, the NIE is internally contradictory and insufficiently supported. It implies that Iran is susceptible to diplomatic persuasion and pressure, yet the only event in 2003 that might have affected Iran was our invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, not exactly a diplomatic pas de deux. As undersecretary of state for arms control in 2003, I know we were nowhere near exerting any significant diplomatic pressure on Iran. Nowhere does the NIE explain its logic on this critical point. Moreover, the risks and returns of pursuing a diplomatic strategy are policy calculations, not intelligence judgments. The very public rollout in the NIE of a diplomatic strategy exposes the biases at work behind the Potemkin village of "intelligence." Third, the risks of disinformation by Iran are real. We have lost many fruitful sources inside Iraq in recent years because of increased security and intelligence tradecraft by Iran. The sudden appearance of new sources should be taken with more than a little skepticism. In a background briefing, intelligence officials said they had concluded it was "possible" but not "likely" that the new information they were relying on was deception. These are hardly hard scientific conclusions. One contrary opinion came from -- of all places -- an unnamed International Atomic Energy Agency official, quoted in the New York Times, saying that "we are more skeptical. We don't buy the American analysis 100 percent. We are not that generous with Iran." When the IAEA is tougher than our analysts, you can bet the farm that someone is pursuing a policy agenda. Fourth, the NIE suffers from a common problem in government: the overvaluation of the most recent piece of data. In the bureaucracy, where access to information is a source of rank and prestige, ramming home policy changes with the latest hot tidbit is commonplace, and very deleterious. It is a rare piece of intelligence that is so important it can conclusively or even significantly alter the body of already known information. Yet the bias toward the new appears to have exerted a disproportionate effect on intelligence analysis. Fifth, many involved in drafting and approving the NIE were not intelligence professionals but refugees from the State Department, brought into the new central bureaucracy of the director of national intelligence. These officials had relatively benign views of Iran's nuclear intentions five and six years ago; now they are writing those views as if they were received wisdom from on high. In fact, these are precisely the policy biases they had before, recycled as "intelligence judgments." That such a flawed product could emerge after a drawn-out bureaucratic struggle is extremely troubling. While the president and others argue that we need to maintain pressure on Iran, this "intelligence" torpedo has all but sunk those efforts, inadequate as they were. Ironically, the NIE opens the way for Iran to achieve its military nuclear ambitions in an essentially unmolested fashion, to the detriment of us all. John R. Bolton, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, is the author of "Surrender Is Not an Option: Defending America at the United Nations and Abroad." He is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.[/rquoter]
So does this mean you've chosen a side, and agree that Bush's invasion of Iraq didn't in any way deter Iran's nuclear program?
A John Bolton essay as 'proof'? There's a real honest, unbiased source. What next? Some of Dick Cheney's paranoid mumblings to prove the case? This is about as useful and worthwhile as a Mahmoud Amenidijad essay on the relative merits and faults of the United States. Keep the song and dance up, basso. I'm noticing a very real trend where when it seems that you are feeling the pressure, you fail to respond to what other people are writing and just pump out volumes of op-ed stories, one after the other - sort of like you are doing now.
WH Press Briefing, December 6, 2007 <object width="425" height="355"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/HBDTb-PvLsk&rel=1"></param><param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/HBDTb-PvLsk&rel=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="355"></embed></object>
