Many folks have wondered why the Iran NIE saw the light of day in the first place if it so obviously contradicts the neocon “all war, all the time” position. Several theories are out there, ranging from it being a counter stroke by the concerned US intel community to it being rolled out by the administration as an excuse to back down from Iran.
I am convinced however that the NIE was released with express intention of paving the way towards an attack on Iran. The vehement response from the neocons, the Village Idiots, the President and especially from Israel indicates very strong opposition to the notion that Iran isn’t a threat.
But it’s who this vehement response is being directed against that indicates the true thrust of the maneuver. Iran, for sure. But the most scorn is being heaped upon our intelligence agencies themselves.
This morning’s screed from The Walrus in WaPo is a strong clue as to how this will shake out.
Rarely has a document from the supposedly hidden world of intelligence had such an impact as the National Intelligence Estimate released this week. Rarely has an administration been so unprepared for such an event. And rarely have vehement critics of the “intelligence community” on issues such as Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction reversed themselves so quickly.
All this shows that we not only have a problem interpreting what the mullahs in Tehran are up to, but also a more fundamental problem: Too much of the intelligence community is engaging in policy formulation rather than “intelligence” analysis, and too many in Congress and the media are happy about it. President Bush may not be able to repair his Iran policy (which was not rigorous enough to begin with) in his last year, but he would leave a lasting legacy by returning the intelligence world to its proper function.
Note that in John Bolton’s world, the intelligence world’s proper function is not to tell the truth, but to shape it to the President’s needs. Playing politics with information and cheery picking it for the White House is “analysis”. Telling the truth in order to try to prevent a catastrophic war is “policy formulation”.
Consider these flaws in the NIE’s “key judgments,” which were made public even though approximately 140 pages of analysis, and reams of underlying intelligence, remain classified.
First, the headline finding — that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 — is written in a way that guarantees the totality of the conclusions will be misread. In fact, there is little substantive difference between the conclusions of the 2005 NIE on Iran’s nuclear capabilities and the 2007 NIE. Moreover, the distinction between “military” and “civilian” programs is highly artificial, since the enrichment of uranium, which all agree Iran is continuing, is critical to civilian and military uses. Indeed, it has always been Iran’s “civilian” program that posed the main risk of a nuclear “breakout.”
Same old song: you don’t have to have nuclear weapons to “have nuclear weapons.”
The real differences between the NIEs are not in the hard data but in the psychological assessment of the mullahs’ motives and objectives. The current NIE freely admits to having only moderate confidence that the suspension continues and says that there are significant gaps in our intelligence and that our analysts dissent from their initial judgment on suspension. This alone should give us considerable pause.
Second, the NIE is internally contradictory and insufficiently supported. It implies that Iran is susceptible to diplomatic persuasion and pressure, yet the only event in 2003 that might have affected Iran was our invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, not exactly a diplomatic pas de deux. As undersecretary of state for arms control in 2003, I know we were nowhere near exerting any significant diplomatic pressure on Iran. Nowhere does the NIE explain its logic on this critical point. Moreover, the risks and returns of pursuing a diplomatic strategy are policy calculations, not intelligence judgments. The very public rollout in the NIE of a diplomatic strategy exposes the biases at work behind the Potemkin village of “intelligence.”
Your job is to regurgitate, not cogitate. Oh, and out invasion of Iraq is now wholly justified if this NIE is right (only it’s not, so what does that mean?)
Third, the risks of disinformation by Iran are real. We have lost many fruitful sources inside Iraq in recent years because of increased security and intelligence tradecraft by Iran. The sudden appearance of new sources should be taken with more than a little skepticism. In a background briefing, intelligence officials said they had concluded it was “possible” but not “likely” that the new information they were relying on was deception. These are hardly hard scientific conclusions. One contrary opinion came from — of all places — an unnamed International Atomic Energy Agency official, quoted in the New York Times, saying that “we are more skeptical. We don’t buy the American analysis 100 percent. We are not that generous with Iran.” When the IAEA is tougher than our analysts, you can bet the farm that someone is pursuing a policy agenda.
Our intel experts are wrong, you see. Iran is going to have nukes at any time now and they will bomb Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and Des Moines, it’s just a matter of time. Because nothing is 100%, that remaining sliver of a percentage is worth going to war over. Cheney’s One Percent Doctrine in action, again.
Fourth, the NIE suffers from a common problem in government: the overvaluation of the most recent piece of data. In the bureaucracy, where access to information is a source of rank and prestige, ramming home policy changes with the latest hot tidbit is commonplace, and very deleterious. It is a rare piece of intelligence that is so important it can conclusively or even significantly alter the body of already known information. Yet the bias toward the new appears to have exerted a disproportionate effect on intelligence analysis.
Fifth, many involved in drafting and approving the NIE were not intelligence professionals but refugees from the State Department, brought into the new central bureaucracy of the director of national intelligence. These officials had relatively benign views of Iran’s nuclear intentions five and six years ago; now they are writing those views as if they were received wisdom from on high. In fact, these are precisely the policy biases they had before, recycled as “intelligence judgments.”
That such a flawed product could emerge after a drawn-out bureaucratic struggle is extremely troubling. While the president and others argue that we need to maintain pressure on Iran, this “intelligence” torpedo has all but sunk those efforts, inadequate as they were. Ironically, the NIE opens the way for Iran to achieve its military nuclear ambitions in an essentially unmolested fashion, to the detriment of us all.
In other words, this is payback for Scooter Libby. Bolton attacks the CIA, State Department, and anyone who is in his eyes is stupid enough to believe Tehran isn’t going to try to nuke Israel into the stone age. To him, these rational realists are the biggest threat to US national security and the safety of the world. And they will not be allowed to stop the coming attack on Iran.
The NIE was leaked with the express purpose of it being discredited to the point where the call for a Stalinist purge of the intelligence community would be “prudent”. Having been burned once already by Valerie Plame, the neocons have decided to take the intel community out of the fight for good rather than risk somebody depth-charging their plans to bomb Tehran. As an added bonus, with the intel community “damaged goods” the warmongers can now safely stovepipe the intel they do want.
As I’ve saide before, we’re one border incident away with war with Iran. The plan by the neocons and their Likudnik backers in Israel is to make it happen.
