Doesn't Iran Matter?

[w¡n9Nµ7 §£@¥€r 123]

[w¡n9Nµ7 §£@¥€r 123]

If Israelis don't care... why do we? After all, it's them we're supposed to be looking after. Right?

Two-thirds of Israelis oppose their country launching on its own a military attack against nuclear installations in arch-foe Iran, said a poll published on Thursday.

When asked "should Israel alone attack the Iranian nuclear installations," 67.2 percent said no, while 20.9 percent said yes and 11.9 percent had no opinion, said the survey aired on public radio.

The poll questioned people after the publication of a bombshell intelligence report in the United States earlier in the week, which said Tehran had frozen its atomic weapons programme in 2003.

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=07...;show_article=1

[GaryC 7]

The Flaws In the Iran Report

By John R. Bolton

Thursday, December 6, 2007; Page A29

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.

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."

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."

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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.

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.

John R. Bolton, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, is the author of "Surrender Is Not an Option: Defending America at the United Nations and Abroad." He is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...id=opinionsbox1

[w¡n9Nµ7 §£@¥€r 123]

If the Israeli's don't want to invade, who are we to interfere on their behalf?

[Mrs.J06 4]

What do you think the price of oil would do if Isreal and Iran traded nukes? What do you think the world terrorism situation would do if Iran attacked Israel and they responded?

Even if both were nuclear, I've got three letters for you: M A D. Sound familiar?

It's not a pretty picture but it does guarantee a good degree of stability.

It sure has done that for decades during the cold war.

mad only works if both sides want to live. The nutjob in Iran wants to start WW3. He thinks that will herald the coming of the hidden Imam.

The nutjob in Teheran hasn't raised the specter of WWIII.

The nutjob in DC, on the other hand, has.

And the Iranian people do want to live. Many of them are still pro-Western. I hope that they hang on to that until after we send Bush into retirement. We should foster that sentiment in the region not kill it by dropping bombs on it.

All I can say is I am glad your not running things. We would all be in trouble. Do me a favor, just ignore anything I talk about when it comes to the mid-east. It is obvious we will never agree. I will see you in a illegal alien post. We get along much better there.

I, on the other hand, am very glad that you're not running things, Gary!