IAEA, NIE And The MMFNI

I'm not sure if I've got that third acronym right -- Mad Mullahs For Nuking Israel, right? -- but the first one sure undercut the second one yesterday, much to the detriment of the third one.

The NIE, National Intelligence Estimate, gave the MMFNI a bunch of breathing room when it came out last December, claiming that to the best of the combined knowledge of the U.S. intelligence community, Iran was not currently pursuing a nuclear weapon. Or at least we were "moderately confident" that was the case.

Israel, for whom mere "moderate confidence" could spell death, was not so sure.

Now it turns out that the IAEA, the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency, isn't so sure either. Its report, released yesterday goes way beyond "moderate confidence" to say Iran's nuclear weapons program is "a matter of serious concern" because of:

• Willful lack of cooperation
• 18 documents that indicate the Iranians are working on explosives, uranium processing and warhead design — activities the NYT bravely reports "could be associated with constructing nuclear weapons." Duh.
• Failure to report R&D activities on faster, more productive centrifuges
• Iranian denial of access to sites where centrifuge components were being manufactured and where research of uranium enrichment was being conducted

In short:

“The Iranians are certainly being confronted with some pretty strong evidence of a nuclear weapons program, and they are being petulant and defensive,” said David Albright, a former weapons inspector who now runs the Institute for Science and International Security. “The report lays out what the agency knows, and it is very damning. I’ve never seen it laid out quite like this.”

To which Baghdad Bob Ali Asghar Soltanieh, Iran’s ambassador to the atomic energy agency, responded

... that the report vindicated Iran’s nuclear activities. It “is another document that shows Iran’s entire nuclear activities are peaceful,” the semi-official Fars News Agency quoted him as saying.

Anyone who still believes the NIE presented an honest assessment of Iran's nuke-quest has two choices when confronting the IAEA's actions: They can admit they were wrong, and that at a minimum we can be "moderately confident" that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons, or they can align themselves with the MMFNI.

Proof NIE Was A Political Lie

You and I don't have spooks and sensitive listening antennae, but we've got common sense, so most of us thought the last National Intelligence Estimate's conclusion that Iran was no longer pursuing nuclear weapons was based on politics, not evidence.

Now there's apparent proof the authors of the NIE were duping us, risking our national security because they wanted to limit President Bush's options in dealing with terror theocrats of Tehran:

VIENNA, Austria (AP) - The U.S. has recently shared sensitive information with the International Atomic Energy Agency on key aspects of Iran's nuclear program that Washington says shows Tehran was directly engaged in trying to make an atomic weapon, diplomats told The Associated Press on Thursday.

The diplomats said Washington also gave the IAEA permission to confront Iran with at least some of the evidence in an attempt to pry details out of the Islamic republic on the activities, as part of the U.N. nuclear watchdog's attempts to investigate Iran's suspicious nuclear past.

The decision by the U.S. administration to declassify its intelligence and indirectly share it with Iran through the IAEA was a clear reflection of Washington's' drive to pressure Iran into admitting that it had focused part of its nuclear efforts toward developing a weapons program.

This appears to be a strategic maneuver to end-run the NIE. If our own intelligence political hacks analysts won't give our info on Iran its due, the Administration figures, why not give it to someone who might? The stakes are high, as evidence by the fact that Washington is putting its hopes in the IAEA. Yikes.

This comes as Iran has just notified the IAEA that its new generation centrifuges are up and running, producing the gas that is required to produce fissile material.

According to AP, the material released to IAEA is primarily recently declassified old stuff -- the contents of a laptop smuggled out of Iran in 2005, materials gained from Israel's recent attack on an alleged nuke facility in Syria, and:

U.S. intelligence also was forwarded on two other issues — the "Green Salt Project" — a plan the U.S. alleges links diverse components of a nuclear weapons program, including uranium enrichment, high explosives testing and a missile re-entry vehicle, and material in Iran's possession showing how to mold uranium metal into warhead form.

Nothing may come of this. The IAEA could decide it is better to hamstring Bush than to deal with Iran -- but they could use the information to pressure Iran further, and if they do, it will be vindication for all of us who smelled a rat in December's NIE.

Not that we need proof ... but it's always good to be able to dramatically slam the book on your case.

Israel Challenges NIE Report On Iran

The Israelis are going to give NIE a run for its money.

Disappointed after failing to make their case on Iran and influence the outcome of the United States's National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) released this week, [Israel's] Military Intelligence will present its hard core evidence on the Islamic Republic's nuclear program on Sunday to the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff during a rare visit he will be making to Israel. ...

[Admiral Michael] Mullen's visit to Israel will be exactly a week after the publication of the NIE report that claimed Iran had frozen its nuclear military program in 2003 and has yet to restart it. During his visit, Military Intelligence plans to present him with Israel's evidence that Iran is in fact developing nuclear weapons.

"The report clearly shows that we did not succeed in making our case over the past year in the run-up to this report," a defense official said Thursday. "Mullen's visit is an opportunity to try and fix that." (JPost)

They've got a challenge ahead of them because Mullen is dovish on military action against Iran, according to Time:

[The NIE] meshes with the views of the operational types at the Pentagon, who have steadfastly resisted the march to war led by some Administration hawks. The anti-war group was composed of Defense Secretary Robert Gates; Admiral Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs; and Admiral William Fallon, who oversees the U.S. forces that would have had to wage that war.

On the Israelis' side is a superior network of intelligence sources and their recent victorious declassification by bombs of Syria's supposedly nonexistent nuclear program.

Going against them is the perception that Israel will go to any length to defuse the Iranian threat against them annunciated by Mah- I'm in the -moud for Jew blood Ahmadinejad (rhymes with "Mosad swells my glands").

We won't know what intelligence the Israelis share with Mullen, since the Israel military is not leak-prone like our CIA and State Department. But if they've got good dope, we'll know it soon enough from the tenor of the Pentagon's and White House's positions on Iran's nuclear program.

Israel Doesn't Agree With NIE

Mike Huckabee may not have heard a peep about the National Intelligence Estimate conclusion that Iran has suspended work on its nuclear bomb, but the Israelis -- who have a bit of a leg up over the preacher from Hope on foreign policy -- certainly had. And they didn't think too kindly of it:

"We have no doubt," said one Israeli official, who requested to remain anonymous. "If one looks at the investment, if one looks at the nature of the project, if you look at the cost to the Iranian economy, there is no logical explanation other than that the Iranian program is not benign."

Joshua Mitnik reports in the WashTimes that Israel remains convinced that only about two years remain before Iran gets the bomb -- read that as we have two years to stop them -- while the NIE says it will take up to 15 years before Tehran can blow Israel off the map.

The article quotes Likud legislator Yuval Steinitz, a member of the Israeli parliament's Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee:

"I don't know of any piece of intelligence that supports this conclusion. It seems to me that this report repeats the mistake of Iraq, but taking it to the opposite conclusion.

"We have a lot of very clear and solid intelligence, that to my best understanding, clearly shows that the Iranians are developing nuclear weapons today, as they did two years ago. This is not a matter of speculation, but this is about solid intelligence."

Some in Israel support the Amemrican intelligence finding, however:

A leading Israeli analyst, Ehud Ya'ari, said on Channel 2 television that the American finding showed that the Iranian program "is further behind than we assumed."

Washington, he said, had rejected Israel's belief that the Iranians are pursuing one or two secret nuclear programs that are not monitored by the West.

"The Americans apparently came to their conclusions on the basis of human intelligence," he said, mentioning Gen. Ali Reza Asghari, a former Iranian deputy defense minister who defected to the West in February.

Oded Granot, a commentator on Channel 1, who, like Mr. Ya'ari, has good connections with Israel's security establishment, said American intelligence had intercepted a transmission from a senior Iranian military official several months ago, in which he expressed disappointment that Iran's nuclear weapons program had been halted.

Does anyone else recall the indisputable fact that our assessment that Saddam Hussein had aggressive biological, chemical and nuclear weapons programs was based primarily on one Iraqi defector's statements to German intelligence? Does anyone else see a similarity here?

This seems like a "those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it" moment.

Mah- I'm- in- the- moud for cock-crowing Ahmadinejad (rhymes with "You've been had!") was certainly ready to reduce any opportunity for us to learn from history:

"This is a declaration of victory for the Iranian nation against the world powers over the nuclear issue," Ahmadinejad told thousands of people during a visit to Ilam province in western Iran.

"This was a final shot to those who, in the past several years, spread a sense of threat and concern in the world through lies of nuclear weapons," Ahmadinejad said, drawing celebratory whistles from the crowd. (AP)

Would you whistle in a celebratory manner if your enemy got your nuclear capabilities assessed right, or would you whistle if your country had succeeded in duping your enemy? Yeah, that's what I thought, too.

Meanwhile, in Putinland, never a country to forsake an opportunity to remember its tarnished, lost past, was quick to seize on the NIE as well:

Russia's foreign minister, meanwhile, indicated that the U.S. report's findings undermined Washington's push for a new set of U.N. sanctions against Iran. (AP)

That shoe fell about as quickly as Nikita Khrushchev's beat up old Oxford fell on the U.N. dais.

If I were a member of a Congressional intelligence committee, I'd be calling secret hearings right now, today, to get to the bottom of this. I agree with the Israelis that there is a mountain of evidence, including particularly Iran's recent admission that it had lied to the IAEA about its possession of P2 centrifuges, that points to an ongoing Mad Mullah nuke program, and I'd want to see every bit of justification the NIE has for altering its assessment.

Shoot me. I just trust the Israelis a lot more than the Tehraniacs.

Moderate Confidence

Would you drive your car on a winding mountain road if you had moderate confidence your brakes would work?

Would you enter a dark alley with $5,000 in your wallet if you had moderate confidence the thugs known to mug people there were taking the night off?

Didn't think so, and that's the gist of Norman Podhoretz' piece in Commentary today reflecting on yesterday's National Intelligence Estimate regarding Iran's nuclear ambitions. He points out that NIE assesses with "high confidence" that Iran stopped its program in 2003, but only with "moderate confidence" that Iran has stayed stopped, or that all its nuke bomb-making activities have stopped.

Podhoretz goes on to ascribe dark motivations to the NIE:

But I entertain an even darker suspicion. It is that the intelligence community, which has for some years now been leaking material calculated to undermine George W. Bush, is doing it again. This time the purpose is to head off the possibility that the President may order air strikes on the Iranian nuclear installations.

If the NIE's moderate confidence turns out to be well-founded, this will be a useful strategy, if indeed it is the intelligence community's strategy. But if they're wrong, it could be much more than moderately disastrous.

Iran's Nuke Program On Hold, But Caution Shouldn't Be

Forty-four blogs are already linked at memeorandum to today's NYT story on the National Intelligence Estimate assessment that Iran stopped actively working on a bomb back in 2003, and I'm sure the number will grow.

Funny; I was telling our office's Token Dem just yesterday that I didn't think Bush had to force the issue during his final year because the current raft of front-runners all appear to be sentient enough to realize that Iran can't be allowed to become a nuclear jihadist state.

The necessary cautionary statement is that the NIE assessment is a time-buyer only and cannot be viewed, as some leftyblogs will surely view it, as proof that Bush is an extremist. After all, can you read this language and be calm about the Mullahs' possible intentions?

The assessment, a National Intelligence Estimate that represents the consensus view of all 16 American spy agencies, states that Tehran is likely keeping its options open with respect to building a weapon, but that intelligence agencies “do not know whether it currently intends to develop nuclear weapons.”

Iran is continuing to produce enriched uranium, a program that the Tehran government has said is designed for civilian purposes. The new estimate says that enrichment program could still provide Iran with enough raw material to produce a nuclear weapon sometime by the middle of next decade, a timetable essentially unchanged from previous estimates.

That's clear enough to keep me on edge, especially given Iran's history of deception and secrecy, and our knowledge of the amount of information made available to them by Pakistan's Dr. Doom. Still, the NYT scoffs, dumping all the concerns in favor of some Bush-bashing:

Rather than painting Iran as a rogue, irrational nation determined to join the club of nations with the bomb, the estimate states Iran’s “decisions are guided by a cost-benefit approach rather than a rush to a weapon irrespective of the political, economic and military costs.” The administration called new attention to the threat posed by Iran earlier this year when President Bush had suggested in October that a nuclear-armed Iran could lead to “World War III” and Vice President Dick Cheney promised “serious consequences” if the government in Tehran did not abandon its nuclear program.

Harry Reid chimed in as well:

Senator Harry Reid, the majority leader, portrayed the assessment as “directly challenging some of this administration’s alarming rhetoric about the threat posed by Iran.” He said he hoped the administration “appropriately adjusts its rhetoric and policy,” and called for a “a diplomatic surge necessary to effectively address the challenges posed by Iran.

Shallow, shallow, shallow. Why do you suppose 2003 was the cut-off year for Iran's program? Do you suppose it had anything to do with our swift removal of Saddam Hussein's government in that very same year just might have given the Mullah's some second thoughts about the wisdom of pursuing nuclear weapons?

Victor Davis Hanson reaches the same conclusion, noting the NIE really should be seen as heartburn for the left.

The other caution, of course, is that the NIE is not always right, as the NYT gleefully points out ...

The new report comes out just over five years after a deeply flawed N.I.E. concluded that Iraq possessed chemical and biological weapons programs and was determined to restart its nuclear program ...

... and if this report is a mistake, the implications to our safety are much greater because of the documentation we have of Iran's nuclear program.

The takeaway, really, is the NIE is just another report that attempts to read the tea leaves at a point in time. Nothing came out today that says we should trust Iran or let down our guard.