WASHINGTON - Over a week after a US
intelligence report revealed that Iran halted its
nuclear weapons program in 2003, the
saber-rattling inside the Washington Beltway
appears to have receded for the moment, and with
it, the George W Bush administration's strongest
pretext for a military confrontation with Iran.
The judgments of the 2007 National
Intelligence Estimate (NIE) contradicted findings
in a similar 2005 report, which assessed
that
Iran was 10 years away from developing nuclear
weapons. That report - the first major review
since 2001 of what is known and what is unknown
about Iran - also said Iran's military was
conducting clandestine nuclear work, and that if
"left to its own devices, Iran is determined to
develop nuclear weapons".
Critics of
Bush's Iran policy believe that the new
intelligence estimate provides the rationale for a
shift in the administration's stance on Tehran,
away from confrontation and towards engagement.
The estimate did not portray Iran as a rogue
ideological state zealously trying to develop
nuclear weapons, as many neo-conservatives have
fiercely argued, but rather a rational political
actor whose "decisions are guided by a
cost-benefit approach rather than a rush to a
weapon irrespective of the political, economic and
military costs".
But the competition of
dueling intelligence estimates is already
underway, as is a battle for the integrity of the
US intelligence community, which has been harshly
criticized for its failure to properly assess the
weapons of mass destruction threat - or the lack
thereof - in the leadup to the Iraq war.
Former Central Intelligence Agency
director George Tenet called the 2002 NIE about
Iraq's weapons programs "one of the lowest moments
of my seven-year tenure". The Iraq report relied
heavily on information provided by a source called
"Curveball", an Iraqi chemical engineer later
revealed as Rafid Ahmed Alwan, who had fed false
information to German intelligence in exchange for
asylum protection for him and his family. Germany
did not trust him, but Alwan's claims eventually
made it to Washington.
Critics argue that
intelligence was also manipulated by policymakers
within the Bush administration to justify an
US-led invasion, and that neo-conservatives are
still trying to exert political control over the
intelligence process.
"The last thing we
need is more political input into intelligence
matters. The facts are the facts, and it's time
conservatives began to deal with the facts on the
ground," said Jon Wolfsthal, a senior fellow at
the Center for Strategic and International
Studies, responding to the attempts to undermine
the NIE's findings. "The days of Doug Feith and
Steve Cambone creating intelligence to suit their
ideology are thankfully behind us," he said.
Meanwhile, neo-conservatives and former
Bush officials have launched a ferocious
counterattack on the NIE, and more pointedly at
its authors - the intelligence officers whose
presumable goal is to undermine the Bush policy
agenda.
"I must confess to suspecting that
the intelligence community, having been excoriated
for supporting the then universal belief that
Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, is now
bending over backward to counter what has up to
now been a similarly universal view ... that Iran
is hell-bent on developing nuclear weapons," wrote
Norman Podhoretz in the right-wing Commentary
Magazine.
"But I entertain an even darker
suspicion. It is the intelligence community, which
has for so many years now been leaking material
calculated to undermine George W Bush, is doing it
again."
In the opinion pages of the
Washington Post, former US envoy to the United
Nations John Bolton was more pointed, accusing the
NIE of being polluted by "refugees from the State
Department" who were brought into the new central
bureaucracy of the Director of National
Intelligence, a position created in the response
to the September 11 Commission assessments on US
intelligence failures. Bolton also criticized the
intelligence community for engaging in "policy
formulation" rather than "intelligence analysis",
and said that the new estimate was based on a bias
given to a new piece of information that could not
decisively negate all previous knowledge.
"It is a rare piece of intelligence that
is so important it can conclusively or even
significantly alter the body of already known
information," said Bolton. "Yet the bias toward
the new approach appears to have exerted a
disproportionate effect on intelligence analysis."
Some experts have suggested that the new
information involved the interception of a
conversation between top Iranian military
officials who were bitter over the Iranian
leadership's decision to halt its weapons program.
More importantly, the US intelligence
community's belief that Iran was pursuing a covert
nuclear weapons program up until 2003 was largely
based on information contained in a laptop
computer belonging to an Iranian engineer, said
Jeffrey Lewis, the director of the
non-proliferation initiative at the
Washington-based New America Foundation
think-tank.
Lewis said that media outlets
erroneously reported that the laptop, which the US
obtained in 2004 and which contained documents
describing two Iranian nuclear programs, termed
L-101 and L-102 by the Iranians, directly related
to weapons work. He said it more specifically
referred to modifications to a missile that would
ostensibly carry a nuclear warhead.
"A lot
of folks, myself included, have wondered about the
reliability of the information. We've even taken
to calling it the 'laptop of death'," he said. But
it was the crude manner in which the documents
were constructed that gave Lewis pause.
"What led many of us to have serious
doubts about it was how utterly unconnected from
reality some of the information seemed. Some of
the reports indicated that some of the view graphs
were done in Powerpoint, which suggested to me
that the program was not terribly sophisticated,"
he said.
The report also seems to
vindicate the UN nuclear watchdog, the
International Atomic Energy Agency, but the NIE
has been rejected by Israel, which claims that
Iranian nuclear weapons program is still running.
And it appears that for the Bush White House, even
facts will not get in the way of policy.
"We're dealing with a country that is
still enriching uranium and remains a leading
state sponsor of terrorism. That is a cause of
great concern to the United States," said Vice
President Dick Cheney in remarks delivered on
Friday at the National World War I Museum.
"Not everyone understands the threat of
nuclear proliferation in Iran or elsewhere but we
and our allies do understand the threat and we
have a duty to prevent it," he said. Earlier last
week, Cheney did express support for the estimate,
saying he had no reason to question "what the
[intelligence] community has produced, with
respect to the NIE on Iran".
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