Tuesday, December 11, 2007

NIE Gnostics The U S intelligence agencies got together recently and released one of their consensus intelligence reviews on Iran's nuclear program U.S.: Iran Halted Nuclear Weapons Plans in 2003. This hit the landscape like a bombshell, but it wasn't exactly clear why  A Blow to Bush's Tehran Policy. It was interpreted as claiming that Iran is not trying to develop nuclear weapons. Great amounts of energy were released quickly in a chain reaction  News Analysis: An Assessment Jars a Foreign Policy Debate About Iran. Iran's desire for nuclear weapons is probably a given. This shouldn't be doubted and that is not what this report was claiming. The only appeal against attainment is greater self interest. And it can be pointed out that Israel's nuclear weapons program is ever the biggest advertisement in the middle east for such a program. It seems to do so much for Israel and on a daily basis. The most successful programs are obscured and ambivalent ones. What does this NIE actually say?  We have only the nine page publicly released summary to examine, but let's look at it Iran threat assessment: the do-over. - By Bonnie Goldstein - Slate Magazine (A pdf of the summary is linked from this article). The first 3 pages are devoted to peculiar throat clearing where the authors explain what they mean when they say "highly confident etc." Essentially that goes something like this: 'Definitely' means 'maybe'. 'Maybe means 'we have no idea' and 'we can't tell' means 'definitely.' The Intelligence community believes: we have multiple sourced information that Iran had a military run weapons program active from the mid 1980's until 2003, when a decision was made to shut it down. We believe it remains shut down. This is not as thoroughly confirmed  Israel Insists That Iran Still Seeks a Bomb - New York Times. This program is or was separate (in addition to) the civilian nuclear enrichment program. The military program involved a wide range of technologies: fissionable material production either indigenous or by a program of external acquisition, triggering and weaponization, and delivery systems i.e. outfitting a missile to carry the bomb that they think they'll end up with. The time frames for having enough fissile material to assemble a bomb are based on indigenous production paths. Centrifuges in operation times their efficiency of operation (rotation speed mainly). Variables due to known technical difficulties (centrifuges shredding when operated at optimum speeds) are taken into account for the estimates. It does not appear that any additional technical hurdles remain, no additional allowance is made for any. Last; it is judged that Iran has all necessary theoretical knowledge to create a nuclear weapon. Any decision not to proceed with making a nuclear weapon would be a political decision and therefore reversible decision. The halt that we believe occurred in 2003 was such a decision. we believe it to be a cost benefit analysis basic on a decsision metric of some type. We do not know the terms of this metric or whether the programs resumption is tied to certain events or to an existing schedule. It is expected to remain a deeply clandestine operation. The official circumstances of release and official reaction were curious from the start. The White House appeared to be taken by surprise Bush Says Iran Still a Danger Despite Report on Weapons - New York Times. But an examination of rhetoric and statements over the last few months made it clear that they knew where the CIA was headed. When the Intelligence community made it clear they wanted to make this the official estimate. They had already ramped up the rhetoric on statements the estimate would not directly contradict and prepared an argument that it was threats of military action not sanctions that had influenced the Iranians  Bush: Iran Intelligence Report Is Warning Signal. The vice presidents apparent non reaction and non involvement mean very little here. Having lost the preferred battle. He has simply shifted to to other means. The Media and public reaction fell into variations on "revenge of the intel community" or that it marked a disinclination of the Pentagon to become involved in a further war. The former is a perverse stretch of the hyper-cautious tone of this NIE How Did a 2005 Estimate on Iran Go Awry? (over the last). I expect revenge to be colder and composed more of iron nickel, and carbon than an intelligence estimate that simply does not declare what it does not know. But what do I know of revenge? The latter issue with the Pentagon is similarly doubtful it is unlikely the intelligence community took it upon themselves to produce an estimate simply to comfort the military. The public explanation pointed to dramatic new data  New Data and New Methods Lead to Revised View on Iran. There did seem to be confusion in the international reaction, and initial commentary warned of the seeming collapse of sanctions regime U.S. Renews Efforts to Keep Coalition Against Tehran. Iran is too large and wealthy a country for the European community to shrug off trade with it. For those inclined to doubt the Iranian bomb this will briefly seem like an opportunity to cease self denial and press for deals. There may be opportunity here to engage that set of Iranian opinion that believes more in their bomb than trade. For some of the Arab states there is worry that U S will not always do their dirty work: Losing Weight in the Gulf - New York Times. An uncompromising U S hardline works for them. Of course some of this same lot would have liked the U S to have responded to the Iraq insurgency by leveling Sadr city. It is more instructive to examine what they will put their name to. The stark shadeless diplomatic initiative to isolate Iran earlier this year, it should be noted, left many of our allies feeling somewhat stampeded. Right wing neo conservative reaction is not less than various expressions of outrage and betrayal John R. Bolton - The Flaws In the Iran Report - washingtonpost.com. At the very least the rest of us can appreciate the humor in hearing these sputtering malcontrites call an intelligence estimate "political." U.S. intel report on Iran was political: Bolton - Yahoo! News They are all just looking at each other now saying: "Where'd our war go?" "I don't know." I cannot figure what they thought this new war would do for them. For some the Victor Hanson crowd, it is simply that it would be a war, for others it is doubling the initial wager, a last wave to the beach before history drowns them. Nuance means nothing to them so they see no need to read small print, or consider the pages of this iceberg that remain classified. It is key that no overt attempt was made to coordinate with this lot. There is little reading between the lines. There was a weapons program, ironically it appears to be notes taken a meeting full of kvetching on the program being ordered into a standown that provided the confirmation Details in Military Notes Led to Shift on Iran, U.S. Says. Everybody in the middle east believed the Iranians were working on a nuclear weapon. Shibley Telhami's periodic public opinion polls confirm that. Why was there so much doubt in the U S and Europe? Likely as not it is not true doubt so much as convenience Bush Says Iran Still Must Explain Past Nuclear Work. There are significant differences between Iraq's situation where WMD proved to be a false positive and Iran's a more cohesive society, wealthier, and with all its regional aspirations still intact. Iran will attempt to sneak up to an active weapon with little sideways steps, a scuttling crab dance, without being seen ever making a straightforward run at it. It appears likely they will keep at it Israelis Brief Top U.S. Official on Iran. Not all parts of the program will run at once, anything that can repurposed from above-board nuclear research will be. The blackout on the clandestine program will be complete: people, locations, portions of the Iranian national budget, and the entire material procurement chain will go dark. For U S intelligence it becomes an exercise in determining the shape and size of the void and what might be able to fit inside it. Confronting the Iranian Bomb In the end will be a matter of emphasizing the costs. The costs ought not be left entirely to the material plane on lost wealth and what we will break, This will have little impact on those that believe that conviction and principle are involved. This will require understanding that insisting that confrontation occur on U S (or Israeli) terms with threats, with the stick half of a carrot and stick approach, is more likely to be read in the end as a reason for acquisition rather than against. 11:52:20 PM    comment [];trackback [];

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