NIE
Posted at 10:08am on Jan. 15, 2008 It's Time to Stop Scoring 'Slam Dunks' for the Other Team
Senator Ensign, with the help of Mitch McConnell and Jon Kyl, should pursue a commission to examine the NIE on Iran
By RS Insider
Lost in the furious coverage of the primaries and abetted by the pack mentality of our national press corps, has been last month’s National Intelligence Estimate on Iran’s nuclear program. Now that Congress is returning to Washington to begin a new year – another year in which it is unlikely that any legislation of import will be passed in its hallowed chambers – some are hoping that Republicans, led by Senator John Ensign (R-NV), will renew their efforts to get at least one important thing done in 2008: To examine the processes, analysis and intelligence that led to the NIE.
The NIE’s contents have been used as a bludgeon by administration critics, the media, and Iranian regime apologists to prevent any further ratcheting up of pressure on Iran. The Bush administration, for its part, has been pushed backed on its heels, and forced to defend the NIE as an “opportunity.”
There has been one, lone voice in the administration who has been having none of it: our inestimable ambassador to the U.N., Zal Khalilzad. Instead of gussying up the NIE’s incontrovertible long-term damage to our efforts to curb Iran’s nuclear and regional ambitions, Ambassador Khalilzad has openly called the NIE for what it is: “a goal against ourselves.”
Zal could have also used another sports analogy, one seemingly favored by our intelligence agencies: We scored a “slam dunk” for the other team. The last NIE may well prove to be as inaccurate as the previous conclusions of the U.S. intelligence community, from Soviet missiles on Cuba in the 1960s, to underestimating Iraq’s nuclear capability before the first Persian Gulf War (Saddam, we later learned, was only a few years away from obtaining a nuclear weapon), to the original “slam dunk” estimates on Iraq’s WMD pre-2003.
The litany of failures goes on, yet the clearly broken intelligence system remains free from any culpability.
Read on...
Posted in Foreign Affairs | Iran | NIE — Comments (3)/ Email this page » / Read More »
Posted at 6:09pm on Dec. 13, 2007 Clarifying The Iran NIE
By Pejman Yousefzadeh
A valuable and interesting op-ed from Henry Kissinger. The following passage deserves mention and further commentary in response to the questions that it raises:
The "Key Judgments" released by the intelligence community last week begin with a dramatic assertion: "We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program." This sentence was widely interpreted as a challenge to the Bush administration policy of mobilizing international pressure against alleged Iranian nuclear programs. It was, in fact, qualified by a footnote whose complex phraseology obfuscated that the suspension really applied to only one aspect of the Iranian nuclear weapons program (and not even the most significant one): the construction of warheads. That qualification was not restated in the rest of the document, which continued to refer to the "halt of the weapons program" repeatedly and without qualification.
The reality is that the concern about Iranian nuclear weapons has had three components: the production of fissile material, the development of missiles and the building of warheads. Heretofore, production of fissile material has been treated as by far the greatest danger, and the pace of Iranian production of fissile material has accelerated since 2006. So has the development of missiles of increasing range. What appears to have been suspended is the engineering aimed at the production of warheads.
The NIE holds that Iran may be able to produce enough highly enriched uranium for a nuclear weapon by the end of 2009 and, with increasing confidence, more warheads by the period 2010 to 2015. That is virtually the same timeline as was suggested in the 2005 National Intelligence Estimate. The new estimate does not assess how long it would take to build a warhead, though it treats the availability of fissile material as the principal limiting factor. If there is a significant gap between these two processes, it would be important to be told what it is. Nor are we told how close to developing a warhead Tehran was when it suspended its program or how confident the intelligence community is in its ability to learn when work on warheads has resumed. On the latter point, the new estimate expresses only "moderate" confidence that the suspension has not been lifted already.
It is therefore doubtful that the evidence supports the dramatic language of the summary and, even less so, the broad conclusions drawn in much of the public commentary. For the past three years, the international debate has concentrated on the Iranian effort to enrich uranium by centrifuges, some 3,000 of which are now in operation. The administration has asserted that this represents a decisive step toward Iranian acquisition of nuclear weapons and has urged a policy of maximum pressure. Every permanent member of the U.N. Security Council has supported the request that Iran suspend its uranium enrichment program; the various countries differ on the urgency with which their recommendations should be pressed and in their willingness to impose penalties.
Posted at 5:19pm on Dec. 13, 2007 Spying and Policymaking Don't Mix
By California Yankee
Required reading: Henry Kissinger on misreading the NIE and the intelligence community's recent tendency to turn itself into a kind of check on, instead of a part of, the executive branch.
Posted at 11:19am on Dec. 11, 2007 Some Further Thoughts on the Iran NIE
By Dan McLaughlin
A few thoughts on last week's announcement of the National Intelligence Estimate, which estimates that Iran ceased its nuclear weapons program in 2003:
1. As Reagan used to say, trust, but verify. U.S. intelligence has historically been lousy regarding other nations' WMD programs, especially police states, going back as far as the USSR and Red China getting The Bomb. The errors haven't even all been in one direction: threats have been underestimated at least as often as overestimated. And if the post-9/11 bureaucratic imperative was to avoid charges of failing to 'connect the dots,' the post-Iraq War imperative is to avoid charges of overestimating WMD threats. So this may well be yet another case of fighting the last war. Taranto's column last Wednesday collected some good analyses, of which there are many more. At a minimum, the NIE should not be taken at face value as holy writ. There's a reason they call these things "estimates."
Posted in Alan Dershowitz | Iran | Iraq | National Security | NIE | WMD — Comments (2) / Email this page » / Read More »
Posted at 5:28pm on Dec. 6, 2007 "From Hell's Heart, I Stab At Thee/For Hate's Sake, I Spit My Last Breath At Thee"
I Am Laughing At The Superior Intellect
By Pejman Yousefzadeh
It is no secret that blogger Steve Clemons has been a wee bit obsessed when it comes to the subject of former UN Ambassador John Bolton, leading, of course, to the titling of this post and the comparisons with one of the characters in this somewhat well known story. Clemons rarely misses a chance to let his obsessions go unsatisfied and so, today, in response to this editorial by Ambassador Bolton on the issue of the recent NIE on Iran, Clemons has this post comparing Bolton's rhetoric with MoveOn.org's "General Betray Us" ad that so spectacularly backfired. According to Clemons, Bolton is trashing intelligence analysts the same way that MoveOn.org trashed General David Petraeus, even stating that Bolton "essentially accuses the entire national security intelligence establishment of betraying American interests in the 2007 Iran National Intelligence Estimate."
Really? Let's look at the "proof" that Clemons offers for this . . . interesting proposition, proof that is presented in the form of an excerpt from Bolton's editorial.
Read on . . .
Posted in Iran | John Bolton | National Security | NIE | Steve Clemons — Comments (6)/ Email this page » / Read More »
