The Redhunter

High confidence generally indicates that our judgements are based on high-quality information, and/or that the nature of the issue makes it possible to render a solid judgement. A "high confidence" judgement is not a fact or certainty, however, and such judgements 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.

What the report does therefore not say is that "Iran has shut down it's program". It speaks in terms of probabilities and admits that it could all be wrong. Not that it is, but that it could be. Further, remember it was only with moderate confidence that it declared that as of mid-2007 "Tehran had not restated its nuclear weapons program."

Two more key findings bear quoting:

E. We do not have sufficient intelligence to judge confidently whether Tehran is willing to maintain the halt of its nuclear programs program indefinitely while it weights its options, or whether it will or already has set specific deadlines or criteria that will promot it to restart the program.

So they might be waiting to see if the political climate changes. What could they be waiting for? One possibility is to see if a Democrat wins the White House in 2008, especially one like Barak Obama or John Edwards. While this comment might seem overly partisan, I think it to be a fair one. Neither has shown any willingness to use military force against Iran, or to use it as a credible threat during diplomacy. Second is that they could be waiting to see if they can chase the U.S. out of Iraq. If they succeed there, their prestige will be enhanced and ours will fall. We will be less willing than ever to use force, and they will know it. Again, they could seize the opportunity to restart work.

And under "E"

• Our assessment that iran halted the program in 2003 primarily in response to international pressure indicates Tehran's desisions are guided by a cost-benefit approach rather than a rush to a weapon irrespective of the political, economic, and military costs. This, in turn, suggests that some combination of threats of international scrutiny and pressures, along with opportuities in Iran to achieve its security, prestige, and goals for regional influence in other ways, might - if perceived by Iran's leaders as credible - prompt Tehran to extend the current halt to its nuclear weapons program. It is difficult to specify what such a combination might be.

Certainly the bit about Iran being "guided by a cost-benefit approach" contradicts much of what I've written about the Iranian leadership. This in turn leads to a few observations

One, of the NIE is accurate, then why has the Iranian leadership, and especially President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, been so bellicose? With Saddam we learned that he was playing a double game; trying to convince his own people, party, and regional threats that he had WMD, while trying to convince us that he didn't. It doesn't seem likely that the Iranians are up to the same thing, but it's possible.

Two, as with Saddam, the Iranian leadership bears ultimate responsibility for our uncertainty. Saddam could have resolved the whole issue of whether he had WMD or not by simply opening up his country for honest inspections. Instead, the history of the mid-to-late 90s with him is one of deception after deception. Ditto with Iran. If they really aren't pursuing weapons then it's their responsibility to open up fully to inspections.

Three, as with others I have to question the accuracy of the NIE, because the Iranian leadership (and yes I know that their president does not hold total power) seems so driven by religious/historical objectives.

Also, under "E" is this

• We assess with moderate confidence that convincing the Iranian leadership to forgo the eventual development of nuclear weapons will be difficult given the linkage many within the leadership probably see between nuclear weapons development and Iran's key national security and foreign policy objectives, and given Iran's considerable effort from at least the late 1980s to 2003 to develop such weapons. In our judgement, only an Iranian political decision to abandon a nuclear weapons objective would plausibly keep Iran from eventually producing nuclear weapons - and such a decisiion is inherently reversible.

In other words, they're probably going to restart their weapons program and talking them out of it will be difficult. Why this one is only of "moderate confidence" is hard to know.

More Observations

If indeed they stopped in 2003, what was the "international pressure" that made them stop? One has to be Operation Iraqi Freedom, in which (yes) many countries besides the U.S. participated. Seems like a vindication of the Iraq war to me.

The left will claim a "victory for diplomacy", yet talk without the credible threat of force to back it up is meaningless. If indeed diplomacy worked, then it did so only because the Iranians knew that if they pushed too far we'd hit them.

The Bush Administration's policy on Iran has been to follow the European's lead, which has been negotiations, sanctions, and the use of international agencies such as the IAEA. Isn't that what the left wants? Or is the mere hint of military action so upsetting to them that it must be completely "off the table"? My own idiot Senator, James Webb, apparently thinks so.

As I said on Monday, if it's accurate, then the new NIE is certainly good news. The 2005 Estimate was to "assess with high confidence that Iran currently is determined to develop nuclear weapons despite its international obligations and international pressure...."

Other Opinion

Mossad and Aman aren't convinced that the NIE has it right. From the New York Times

Israel today took a darker view of Iran’s nuclear ambitions than the assessment released by United States intelligence agencies yesterday, saying it was convinced that Iran was pursuing nuclear weapons.

It said Iran had probably resumed the nuclear weapons program the American report said was stopped in the fall of 2003. “It is apparently true that in 2003 Iran stopped pursuing its military nuclear program for a certain period of time,” Defense Minister Ehud Barak told Israeli Army Radio. “But in our estimation, since then it is apparently continuing with its program to produce a nuclear weapon.”

The Israelis are hardly infallible, but they are to be taken seriously.

The editors of National Review aren't impressed either

First, the NIE says that Iran was indeed operating a covert nuclear-weapons program up to the fall of 2003. Until now, no NIE had held that such a program existed. The acknowledgement that one did is a big piece of news — even if not many people want to talk about it. Yes, the NIE also claims that Iran suspended weapons-related activities in 2003. But the question for policymakers is whether a regime that has, in the past four years, tried to build atomic bombs, should be trusted with civilian technologies that greatly increase its ability to make a bomb whenever it wishes to do so.

And that’s the second thing to remember about this NIE: It relies on an unrealistic distinction between civilian and military nuclear technologies. When it says Iran suspended its weapons program in 2003, what it means is that Iran isn’t currently designing or building warheads, or other components of nuclear weapons. But it concedes that Iran “made significant progress in 2007 installing centrifuges at Natanz.” And while the NIE judges “with moderate confidence” that Iran “still faces significant technical problems” operating the centrifuges, it does not question that the enrichment of uranium continues.
...

Of course, all this assumes that the NIE is accurate and impartial — and there is reason to doubt that. It’s no secret that careerists at the CIA and State have been less interested in implementing the president’s policies on Iran, Iraq, and North Korea than in sabotaging them at every opportunity. Sources close to the intelligence community question the objectivity of the NIE’s Iran conclusions, and tell us that three principal authors of the report are longtime critics of the administration’s policy who have axes to grind.

We can’t know for sure whether the claims in the NIE are correct. What we do know is this: The Islamic Republic is killing Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan. It has exported terror around the globe. It has powerful strategic reasons to want an atomic bomb: to counterbalance American influence, and to become a hegemon in the Middle East. And it continues to enrich uranium while refusing to allow the kind of intrusive and thorough inspections that would allow us to test its claim that it seeks nothing but electricity. Until that big picture changes, it would be irresponsible for any American policymaker to conclude that the Iranian threat had diminished.

Robert Rubin in the New York Daily News reminds us that

Just last month, IAEA Director Mohamed ElBaradei revealed Iran had a blueprint for a nuclear warhead provided by disgraced Pakistani nuclear scientist A.Q. Khan during a visit to Tehran in the 1990s.

Writing on the Media Blog at NRO Tom Gross has a host of good links and quotes, all from major publications. Here are a few

William J. Broad in The New York Times:

When is a nuclear program a nuclear weapons program? The open secret of the nuclear age is that the line between civilian and military programs is extraordinarily thin...

The Washington Post

While U.S. intelligence agencies have “high confidence” that covert work on a bomb was suspended “for at least several years” after 2003, there is only “moderate confidence” that Tehran has not restarted the military program. Iran’s massive overt investment in uranium enrichment meanwhile proceeds in defiance of binding U.N. resolutions, even though Tehran has no legitimate use for enriched uranium. The U.S. estimate of when Iran might produce enough enriched uranium for a bomb – sometime between late 2009 and the middle of the next decade — hasn’t changed.

Robert Baer (who is a former CIA field officer) in TIME magazine:

… Then there are the Gulf Arabs. For the last year and a half, ever since the Bush Administration started to hint that it might hit Iran, they have been sending emissaries to Tehran to assure the Iranians they’re not going to help the U.S. But in private, the Gulf Arabs have been reminding Washington that Iran is a rabid dog: Don’t even think about kicking it, the Arabs tell us. If you have to do something, shoot it dead. Which is something the U.S. can’t do. So how far is Iran from a nuke? The truth is that Iran is a black hole, and it’s entirely conceivable Iran could build a bomb and we wouldn’t know until they tested it...

The hard reality is that at this point President Bush doesn't have the political capital to "shoot it dead". That's the penalty for taking so long to get Iraq on the right track.

Update

Bret Stephens, writing in the OpinionJournal, pointed out the other day that another NIE failed to anticipate that Nikita Khrushchev might place missiles in Cuba. From the Estimate

"The USSR could derive considerable military advantage from the establishment of Soviet medium- and intermediate-range ballistic missiles in Cuba, or from the establishment of a submarine base there. . . . Either development, however, would be incompatible with Soviet practice to date and with Soviet policy as we presently estimate it."

--Special National Intelligence Estimate 85-3-62, Sept. 19, 1962

Twenty-five days later our U-2 photographed the Soviets building a base for SS-4 missiles in Cuba, and the rest is history.