right. so looking at this story. you can see that the agencies were not having Cheney's bullshit this go around. secondly, most of his boys are gone and/or foot out the door.
dude the NIE that Tenet ultimately declassified in October (not to be confused with the classified one from August of that year) basically presented the aluminum tubes argument and pursuit of chemical and nuclear weapons as consensus points. in fact there were many people in the intel community that doubted these claims, but whose views were relegated to footnotes in the Oct. 2002 NIE.
if you have evidence to the contrary please to knowledge me.
The new national intelligence estimate says that up until fall 2003 Iran was working on a nuclear weapon, but due to international pressure it stopped and hasn't started work on it since.
yeah, but don't forget that the 2002 NIE basically made the Bush case for war (aluminum tubes, pursuit of nukes, production of chemical agents).
I think the intelligence agencies are trying to be very careful about what they say, especially about countries like Iran and North Korea because they've been called out about their bad reporting on Iraq. The last NIE on Iran said that Iran was working on a bomb despite the international pressure. This is a direct turn around, which to me, seems to point to new information and being willing to admit that they're wrong, something they refused to do for months and months after the Iraqi war was over and their estimates of the WMD were false for everyone to see.
fair enough. I just think it's important to consider the source. I don't have a lot of confidence in NIEs one way or another after the Iraq disaster.
also, people often view the NIE as some definitive consensus document representing the best intel, which it isn't necessarily. the NIE is more often than not the product of internecine BS among the various agencies within the US gov't, and is very much susceptible political pressure.
The fact that the NIE said that Iran hasn't worked on its nuke program since 2003 goes against what the Administration wants to hear right now though. PLus they're not the only one questioning Iran's nuke program right now. The IAEA also said that Iran was behind, etc.
But back to the topic. Bush and Co. knew all of this over a year ago, but kept pounding the War drums--culminating in Bush's over-the-top WW3 statements. Now we can see the Iranian regime for what they are, a bunch of shit talking pussies.
No, there were some dissenting opinions in the NIE on Iraq, but the basic thrift of it was that Iraq had WMD, and that it was expanding its program beyond what it had during the first Gulf War. The arguments were over the details like whether the aluminum tubes were evidence, but the general opinion of WMD was shared by all except for maybe the State Dept's intelligence bureau.
my opinion is admittidly skewed because my friends work at State. i had one friend over at DoD, but he left and DoD does not generally push back.
the Intel from 2002 came with enough caveats from the administrative and program level (Professional) that any reasonable manager or above (Political) should have held back, but we know where these people were coming from and how they actively derailed any systematic procedures for developing policy.
footnotes are important. i'm not interested in this debate about the lead up to Iraq. it is Frickin' boring as hell. lol at anyone still trying throw this Frickin' disaster at the feet of professional Intel folks.
my opinion is admittidly skewed because my friends work at State.
no offense but this explains a lot.
no offense, but fuck you.
dude calm down.
you made clear from your post that you understand (as I do) that these agencies have different cultures/outlooks/missions and are often in competition with each other.
and you admitted that your personal connection to State might color your view of things.
that's all homie.
my original point is that not everyone understands this. the NY Times runs a headline saying "New NIE Says Iran Halted Nuke Production in 2003" and 99% of readers think "OK, well if that's the NIE then they must know what they're talking about."
most folls don't give it too much thought and most folls have waaaay too short a memory to remember how the 2002 NIE was so crudely and politically manipulated.
at the end of the day I want to believe the current NIE on Iran as much as you do.
but forgive people for being a bit skeptical given that whole little Iraq thing.
The fact that the NIE said that Iran hasn't worked on its nuke program since 2003 goes against what the Administration wants to hear right now though.
no doubt.
PLus they're not the only one questioning Iran's nuke program right now. The IAEA also said that Iran was behind, etc.
sure but the IAEA has about as much credibility in my eyes as the Bush admin.
I'm not going to take the IAEA as my only source but they were right about Iraq's nuke program before the war and blew the story on the Niger documents as well.
The smiles on the faces of several U.S. military personnel at a previously scheduled Washington think tank session on Iran???s ???bomb??? said it all Tuesday: The United States is not going to start a third Middle East war anytime soon.
Monday???s new National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) stating ???with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program??? dropped the big one on those in Washington and elsewhere who have been urging the Bush Administration to strike Iran ???before it is too late.???
Despite President Bush???s efforts at his press conference to act as though nothing has changed, everything has. Chuck Frelich, a former Israeli deputy national security adviser, called the news ???an earthquake??? that ???gives us more time to explore the diplomatic route.??? The Nixon Center???s Geoffrey Kemp, appearing on the same panel at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, agreed. The NIE ???changes the political dynamics in this town???, he said. ???The out of the blue pre-emptive strike . . . is a long way off.???
There are still many questions about the new estimate and its origins. The intelligence community, in its eagerness not to promise another ???slam dunk???, may have erred on the side of caution. Iran has accelerated its overt enrichment program since 2005 and could produce enough fissile material for a bomb in as little as two years, more plausibly by 2015, the estimate said.
But a key conclusion of the NIE is that a negotiated solution is possible. Iran, it turns out, is not a nation of mad mullahs but a country whose ???decisions are guided by a cost-benefit approach.??? Its leaders are susceptible to pressure and worried about Iran???s international posture. Iran shut down the weapons program in 2003 because it had been caught cheating and in a post-9/11 environment, was worried about the consequences. At the same time it started negotiations with Great Britain, France and Germany???negotiations that it thought would be quickly joined by the United States.
That did not happen. President Bush, at his news conference, misspoke when he said that the United States ???facilitated??? the European talks with Iran in 2003. In fact, then???under secretary of state John Bolton did nothing to help. He actively tried to sabotage the talks with leaks about threatening Iranian remarks to the Europeans. Bush also misspoke when he said that ???at that point in time??? (2003) his administration said it would stop blocking Iran???s application to join the World Trade Organization and provide spare parts for civilian airliners if Iran halted its program. Those carrots were not put on the table until 2005, shortly before Iranian presidential elections replaced Mohammad Khatami with the more belligerent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The United States did not offer to actually join the negotiations until May 2006???and only then if Iran suspended its uranium program.
Will Bush now pursue a diplomatic option more strenuously? New sanctions will be harder to achieve but it will be easier to justify talks with Tehran. At the very least, Bush will not bomb Iran before he leaves office. And that is something for which everyone around the world???not just the overstretched U.S. military???should be grateful.
Barbara Slavin is senior diplomatic reporter at USA Today on leave as a Jennings Randolph fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace and the author of Bitter Friends, Bosom Enemies: Iran, the U.S. and the Twisted Path to Confrontation (St. Martin???s Press, 2007).
In its May 2005 analysis, it said that it had "high confidence that Iran currently is determined to develop nuclear weapons". Yet that gloomy assessment was made, according to this week's report, when the nuclear programme had already been on hold for two years.
NPR.org, December 4, 2007 ?? The controversy over Iran's nuclear program is complicated by the fact that, although Iran said it had stopped researching nuclear weapons, it defied the United Nations by resuming an effort to enrich uranium.
Iranian officials said they wanted the enriched radioactive material as fuel for peaceful nuclear reactors. When President Bush and other administration officials accused Iran of seeking to develop a nuclear bomb, they often referred to Iran's uranium-enrichment program as proof.
Here's a timeline highlighting what was said and known about the program since early 2003:
February 2003: Inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the United Nations nuclear watchdog agency, find evidence that Iran has secretly begun enriching uranium.
May 2003: Iranian President Mohammed Khatami offers to talk to the United States about the countries' differences. But the Bush administration rejects the offer. In part because of this refusal, the Europeans act on their own to negotiate with the Iranians while trying to persuade the Bush administration to join the negotiation process.
October 2003: The EU 3 ??? France, Britain and Germany ??? reach an initial understanding with Iran to suspend nuclear enrichment. The Bush administration refuses to support this, insisting suspension of nuclear enrichment is not enough. The Bush administration insists that before it will enter into any negotiations with the Iranians, Iran must commit to abandoning enrichment all together.
November 2003: The IAEA announces that Iran has been violating its safeguards agreement under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. It accuses Tehran of failing to report that it was handling nuclear material and building facilities to process it. It says Iranian officials hid key parts of their nuclear program for nearly 20 years. The latest National Intelligence Estimate now says it believes "with high confidence" that the fall of 2003 was about the time Iran shut down a secret nuclear weapons program.
December 2003: After talks with the European Union, Iran agrees to allow IAEA inspectors to question its scientists and officials, review documents and visit some of its nuclear research and development facilities.
November 2004: Iran promises negotiators from the EU that it will suspend all its activities for processing nuclear fuel. Although Iran continues to deny that its activities have any military purpose, President Bush calls it a "nuclear weapons program," and chides Iran's leaders for suspending it, rather than ending it entirely. "Our position is that they ought to terminate their nuclear weapons program," Bush says.
February 2005: President Bush accuses Iran of being "the world's primary state sponsor of terror, pursuing nuclear weapons, while depriving its people of the freedom they seek and deserve."
June 2005: Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice says the United States will not support a third term for Mohammed ElBaradei as head of the IAEA unless he takes a harder line against Iran's nuclear program.
April 2006: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says Iranian scientists have successfully enriched uranium to the 3.5 percent level, pure enough to run a nuclear reactor. He says, "I am officially announcing that Iran has joined the group of those countries which have nuclear technology." Uranium for a nuclear bomb would require around 90 percent enrichment.
July 2006: The United Nations Security Council passes a resolution demanding that Iran suspend its nuclear enrichment activities or face international sanctions.
December 2006: The U.N. Security Council unanimously imposes sanctions on Iran for failure to halt its uranium enrichment program. It bans U.N. member states from providing Iran with equipment or technology that could be used in its nuclear program.
January 2007: IAEA head Mohammed ElBaradei calls for a "timeout" on the issue of Iran's nuclear program, saying the United Nations should suspend sanctions against Iran if Iran will freeze its nuclear program. He tells CNN, "The key to the Iranian issue is a direct engagement between Iran and the U.S., similar to North Korea."
Spring 2007: The National Intelligence Estimate was expected to be delivered to Congress during this period, but is repeatedly postponed as intelligence agencies re-assess information about Iran's nuclear program.
August 2007: President Bush says, "Iran's active pursuit of technology that could lead to nuclear weapons threatens to put a region already known for instability and violence under the shadow of a nuclear holocaust." The latest National Intelligence Estimate says, "we assess with moderate confidence Tehran had not restarted its nuclear weapons program as of mid-2007."
September 2007: U.S. intelligence officials, including CIA Director Michael Hayden, begin a reassessment of their information on Iran, according to unnamed officials quoted in the New York Times. The newspaper says White House officials knew at the time that the intelligence agencies were reviewing their conclusions, but did not know until later that those conclusions were drastically being changed.
October 2007: President Bush says, "we got a leader in Iran who has announced that he wants to destroy Israel. So I've told people that if you're interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them from having the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon."
November 2007: A final draft of the National Intelligence Estimate is presented to President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.
December 2007: A day after the National Intelligence Estimate is made public, President Bush says he was first told by Director of Intelligence Michael McConnell in August that there was new intelligence about Iran's nuclear program, but that he wasn't told what that new intelligence was at the time. President Bush, in a press conference, says he still regards Iran as "dangerous." He asks reporters, "What's to say they couldn't start another covert nuclear weapons program?"
I wonder how the authors of this article would react to the release of the new NIE.
While their basic premise may hold (engage rather than isolate Iran), you have to at least consider the possibility that Iran's 2003 halt to their development of nukes -- if indeed it was halted -- may have had something to do with the massing of US troops on their border as a direct result of Iraq's (alleged) pursuit of the same technology.
President Bush, at his news conference, misspoke[/b] when he said that the United States ???facilitated??? the European talks with Iran in 2003. In fact, then???under secretary of state John Bolton did nothing to help. He actively tried to sabotage the talks with leaks about threatening Iranian remarks to the Europeans.
Bush also misspoke[/b] when he said that ???at that point in time??? (2003)
Holy c--p! I cant believe you fools would try to spin this ringing endorsement of the bush doctrine as a blow to bushset. This rush to war with iran yall been splattering about only existed in your tiny, unsmart minds.
bushset?
Can't the mods institute a "one alias to a customer" limit?
Little is mentioned about the fact that, thirty years ago, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, et al. were all putting forward the position that they should push to complete a multi-billion dollar deal with Iran to sell them both large quantities of plutonium and enriched uranium (the two pathways to a nuclear bomb). Why the sudden change of mind? Well, back then the US had installed a tyrannical dictator who ran Iran with an iron fist and did what he was told.
After failing to challenge anything the government said in the run-up to the Iraq invasion, the British press have been eager to whip up a frenzy for a new and equally unpopular war:
IRAN - THE MEDIA FALL INTO LINE
Writing in the Guardian last month, Timothy Garton Ash observed: ???Now we face the next big test of the west: after Iraq, Iran.??? Garton Ash thus blithely ignored the fact that every last scrap of evidence coming out of Iraq has pointed to only one conclusion - that Iraq???s ???big test??? was in fact the West???s big lie. Iraq was offering a threat to precisely no one outside its own borders.
Nevertheless, Garton Ash warned: ???we in Europe and the United States have to respond. But how???? (Timothy Garton Ash, ???Let's make sure we do better with Iran than we did with Iraq,??? The Guardian, January 12, 2006)
The Guardian???s Polly Toynbee joined the propaganda chorus demonising Iran: ???Now the mad mullahs of Iran will soon have nuclear bombs, are we all doomed?... Do something, someone! But what and who???? (Toynbee, ???No more fantasy diplomacy: cut a deal with the mullahs,??? The Guardian, February 7, 2006)
Gerard Baker provided the answer in the Times: ???The unimaginable but ultimately inescapable truth is that we are going to have to get ready for war with Iran???. (Baker, ???Prepare yourself for the unthinkable: war against Iran may be a necessity,??? The Times, January 27, 2006)
Why might this be?
???If Iran gets safely and unmolested to nuclear status, it will be a threshold moment in the history of the world, up there with the Bolshevik Revolution and the coming of Hitler.???
Readers will recall near-identical propaganda ahead of the assault on Iraq. Baker continued with some fearsome predictions:
???Iran, of course, secure now behind its nuclear wall, will surely step up its campaign of terror around the world. It will become even more of a magnet and haven for terrorists... Imagine how much more our freedoms will be curtailed if our governments fear we are just one telephone call or e-mail, one plane journey or truckload away from another Hiroshima. ???
This is the same Gerard Baker who wrote in the Financial Times in February 2003 that ???victory [in Iraq] will quickly vindicate US and British claims about the scale of the threat Saddam poses???.
Baker was positively gleeful: ???I cannot wait to hear what the French, Russians and Germans have to say when the conquering troops begin to uncover the death factories Mr Hussein has been hiding from inspectors for 12 years... And do not be shocked if allied liberators discover all kinds of connections between Baghdad and terrorism around the world???. (Baker, ???Defeating prejudice with persuasion,??? Financial Times, February 20, 2003)
A year later, Baker had airbrushed his own justification for war from history: ???Saddam Hussein asked for the benefit of the doubt. But that was not something a wise leader could possibly have given him. His actions had shown again and again the threat he represented. This threat lay not in vats of chemicals or nuclear centrifuges but in his ambitions.??? (Baker, ???Freedom from fear is a worthy goal,??? Financial Times, March 18, 2004)
In his February 2003 article, Baker had predicted: ???it will become clear, even to the most rabid of anti-Americans just how much better off Iraqi people will be without their current president. The lifting of the yoke of Saddam Hussein will be an act of humanity far greater than the unseating of the Taliban.??? (Baker, op. cit)
The New York Times??? Paul Krugman describes the current state of Iraq sans ???yoke???: ???In fact, reconstruction has failed. Almost three years after the war began, oil production is well below prewar levels, Baghdad is getting only an average of 3.2 hours of electricity a day, and more than 60 percent of water and sanitation projects have been canceled. So now, having squandered billions in Iraqi oil revenue as well as American taxpayer dollars, we have told the Iraqis that from here on in it is their problem.??? (Krugman, ???State of delusion,??? New York Times, February 3, 2006)
According to the Los Angeles Times, America's would-be Marshall Plan in Iraq ???is drawing to a close this year??? with ???much of its promise unmet and no plans to extend its funding???. (Cited, ibid)
Baker is a signatory to the Statement of Principles posted at the website of The Henry Jackson Society. Patrons include mild-mannered neoconservatives like former US assistant secretary of defence Richard Perle, William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, and James Woolsey, former director of the CIA. Other signatories include former head of MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove, Colonel Tim Collins, Oliver Kamm, Andrew Roberts and Jamie Shea.
The Society declares that it: ???Supports a ???forward strategy??? to assist those countries that are not yet liberal and democratic to become so. This would involve the full spectrum of our ???carrot??? capacities, be they diplomatic, economic, cultural or political, but also, when necessary, those ???sticks??? of the military domain.??? (http://www.henryjacksonsociety.org) Serbia, Afghanistan and Iraq know all about the ??????sticks??? of the military domain???. Four of the Society???s eight ???Principles??? refer to military intervention and military power - another notes that ???only modern liberal democratic states are truly legitimate???. Everyone else, we can presume, is fair game.
Ten Years From A Bomb When officialdom targets a new ???deadly threat???, journalists often embarrass themselves in their rush to be ???on side???. The January 20, 2005, BBC 1 Lunchtime News saw diplomatic correspondent James Robbins declare that US relations with Iran were "looking very murky because of the nuclear threat". (BBC1, 13:00 News, January 20, 2005)
Four days later, Robbins responded to Media Lens emailers: ???I accept that it would have been better to have said ???alleged nuclear threat???. I am sorry that my wording was not as precise as it could have been.??? (Email to Media Lens, January 24, 2005)
Similarly, in a front-page article this week, the Guardian reported that Iran's foreign minister had threatened immediate retaliation over a move to refer its "nuclear weapons activities" to the United Nations security council. A correction was printed in the paper two days later:
???We should have said ???nuclear activities???, not ???nuclear weapons activities???.??? (Corrections and clarifications, The Guardian, February 7, 2006) Although Iran has removed the seals it put in place at its nuclear fuel research sites, experts say it is at least a decade away from being able to produce a nuclear bomb. Consider the current media hysteria in light of the basic facts below. Atomic weapons can be produced in two ways - either by using highly enriched uranium, or plutonium. Iran is known to have produced reconstituted uranium, "yellow cake", at its conversion facility at Isfahan. However, according to a September 2005 report by The International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), this material is contaminated and not currently useable. If Iran were able to overcome the problem of purification, it would then need to enrich the uranium.
Whereas uranium used in nuclear reactors requires only a small amount of enrichment, weapons-grade uranium mus
t be highly enriched. This can be done using gas centrifuges, of which Iran has 164 installed at its plant at Natanz. But this constitutes just 20 per cent of the number required to produce a bomb. Frank Barnaby, of UK think tank The Oxford Research Group, comments:
"They don't currently have enough centrifuges working - so far as we know - to produce significant amounts of highly-enriched uranium or even enriched uranium. They would need a lot more." (Sarah Buckley and Paul Rincon, ???Iran ???years from nuclear bomb???,' www.bbc.co.uk, January 12, 2006)
Given these and other problems, the IISS believes it would take Iran at least a decade to produce enough high-grade uranium to make a single nuclear weapon. Dr Barnaby agrees:
"The CIA says 10 years to a bomb using highly enriched uranium and that is a reasonable and realistic figure in my opinion."
Alternatively, Iran could use plutonium to produce a bomb. But the IISS notes that Iran would need to build a reprocessing plant suited to the fuel used in its Bushehr nuclear reactor - an extremely challenging technical task. Iran is also constructing a heavy-water research reactor at Arak. But, again, this will not be ready until at least 2014, and probably later, according to the IISS. The West???s hypocrisy and double standards could hardly be clearer but they are off the media agenda. The United States is estimated to be in possession of no less than 10,600 nuclear warheads. Its leading ally in the region, Israel, also has nuclear weapons, as do Russia, Pakistan, India and China. Britain has recently sold nuclear-capable bombers to India, while the United States has sold nuclear-capable bombers to Pakistan. Iran???s is indeed a ???tough neighbourhood???. The media never mention the military coup organised by Britain and the United States to overthrow the democratically elected government of Iran in 1953 to secure the country???s oil. No mention is made of the massive military support subsequently sent to the Shah dictatorship before it was overthrown in 1979. Britain and America were thus directly responsible for a country that had the "highest rate of death penalties in the world, no valid system of civilian courts and a history of torture" which was "beyond belief". It was a society in which "the entire population was subjected to a constant, all-pervasive terror", according to Amnesty International. (Martin Ennals, Secretary General of Amnesty International, cited in an Amnesty Publication, Matchbox, Autumn 1976) All of this is waved away as inconsequential by journalists. Objections to military action are usually raised on grounds of possible negative consequences for the West. The likely cost in lives to the Iranian people is rarely even discussed.
Last month, the journalist Felicity Arbuthnott described the cataclysm generated by the US-UK 'liberation' of Iraq:
???For Iraq watchers, the daily carnage of liberation, the searing, wailing grief of the bereaved, bombed, bereft, haunt. Neighborhoods, evocative ancient homes reduced to rubble by the 'liberators', the surviving, bewildered, standing on shattered bricks, mortar, toys, belongings, liberated even from home's secure warmth. ???In the distorted horrors of today's Iraq, many never make it home: disappeared, kidnapped, shot by the occupying forces for driving, walking, and playing, in familiar venues. Iraqi lives are the earth's cheapest. 'Government' or occupying troops kill 'insurgents' (even if baby or toddler ???insurgents???) and few questions are asked.??? (Felicity Arbuthnott, ???Death of Humanity,??? PalestineChronicle.com, January 18, 2006)
Despite even this, despite everything that has happened, Western journalists are once again falling obediently into line as the British and American governments begin the long, arduous process of demonising another oil-rich target.
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I wonder how the authors of this article would react to the release of the new NIE.
While their basic premise may hold (engage rather than isolate Iran), you have to at least consider the possibility that Iran's 2003 halt to their development of nukes -- if indeed it was halted -- may have had something to do with the massing of US troops on their border as a direct result of Iraq's (alleged) pursuit of the same technology.
2) Iran has a huge influence with the Shiites and Kurds that are now running Iraq
3) There's been a huge boom in business for Iran in Iraq with religious tourism to places like Karbala, Iran provides electricity for large parts of the south, has large trade with the Kurds
5) If the U.S. ever did attack Iran, Iraq is the best way for Iran to strike back
Overall, all the U.S. threats and positioning probably helped out the hard-liners within Iran as wekk,
Plus one report I heard said it was the European Union that pressured Iran to stop its nuclear weapons program.
I wonder how the authors of this article would react to the release of the new NIE.
While their basic premise may hold (engage rather than isolate Iran), you have to at least consider the possibility that Iran's 2003 halt to their development of nukes -- if indeed it was halted -- may have had something to do with the massing of US troops on their border as a direct result of Iraq's (alleged) pursuit of the same technology.
2) Iran has a huge influence with the Shiites and Kurds that are now running Iraq
3) There's been a huge boom in business for Iran in Iraq with religious tourism to places like Karbala, Iran provides electricity for large parts of the south, has large trade with the Kurds
5) If the U.S. ever did attack Iran, Iraq is the best way for Iran to strike back
Overall, all the U.S. threats and positioning probably helped out the hard-liners within Iran as wekk,
Plus one report I heard said it was the European Union that pressured Iran to stop its nuclear weapons program.
There's no doubt Iran's regional position has been strengthened by the Iraq war. (Iran's regional position has been strengthened by the toppling of the Taliban also).
But like I said you have to at least consider the possibility that Iran's 2003 halt to their development of nukes -- if indeed it was halted -- may have had something to do with the massing of US troops on their border as a direct result of Iraq's (alleged) pursuit of the same technology.
Comments
dude the NIE that Tenet ultimately declassified in October (not to be confused with the classified one from August of that year) basically presented the aluminum tubes argument and pursuit of chemical and nuclear weapons as consensus points. in fact there were many people in the intel community that doubted these claims, but whose views were relegated to footnotes in the Oct. 2002 NIE.
if you have evidence to the contrary please to knowledge me.
The fact that the NIE said that Iran hasn't worked on its nuke program since 2003 goes against what the Administration wants to hear right now though. PLus they're not the only one questioning Iran's nuke program right now. The IAEA also said that Iran was behind, etc.
no doubt.
sure but the IAEA has about as much credibility in my eyes as the Bush admin.
my opinion is admittidly skewed because my friends work at State. i had one friend over at DoD, but he left and DoD does not generally push back.
the Intel from 2002 came with enough caveats from the administrative and program level (Professional) that any reasonable manager or above (Political) should have held back, but we know where these people were coming from and how they actively derailed any systematic procedures for developing policy.
no offense but this explains a lot.
no offense, but fuck you.
dude calm down.
you made clear from your post that you understand (as I do) that these agencies have different cultures/outlooks/missions and are often in competition with each other.
and you admitted that your personal connection to State might color your view of things.
that's all homie.
my original point is that not everyone understands this. the NY Times runs a headline saying "New NIE Says Iran Halted Nuke Production in 2003" and 99% of readers think "OK, well if that's the NIE then they must know what they're talking about."
most folls don't give it too much thought and most folls have waaaay too short a memory to remember how the 2002 NIE was so crudely and politically manipulated.
at the end of the day I want to believe the current NIE on Iran as much as you do.
but forgive people for being a bit skeptical given that whole little Iraq thing.
I'm not going to take the IAEA as my only source but they were right about Iraq's nuke program before the war and blew the story on the Niger documents as well.
Inside Track: Off the Warpath?
by Barbara Slavin
12.04.2007
The smiles on the faces of several U.S. military personnel at a previously scheduled Washington think tank session on Iran???s ???bomb??? said it all Tuesday: The United States is not going to start a third Middle East war anytime soon.
Monday???s new National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) stating ???with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program??? dropped the big one on those in Washington and elsewhere who have been urging the Bush Administration to strike Iran ???before it is too late.???
Despite President Bush???s efforts at his press conference to act as though nothing has changed, everything has. Chuck Frelich, a former Israeli deputy national security adviser, called the news ???an earthquake??? that ???gives us more time to explore the diplomatic route.??? The Nixon Center???s Geoffrey Kemp, appearing on the same panel at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, agreed. The NIE ???changes the political dynamics in this town???, he said. ???The out of the blue pre-emptive strike . . . is a long way off.???
There are still many questions about the new estimate and its origins. The intelligence community, in its eagerness not to promise another ???slam dunk???, may have erred on the side of caution. Iran has accelerated its overt enrichment program since 2005 and could produce enough fissile material for a bomb in as little as two years, more plausibly by 2015, the estimate said.
But a key conclusion of the NIE is that a negotiated solution is possible. Iran, it turns out, is not a nation of mad mullahs but a country whose ???decisions are guided by a cost-benefit approach.??? Its leaders are susceptible to pressure and worried about Iran???s international posture. Iran shut down the weapons program in 2003 because it had been caught cheating and in a post-9/11 environment, was worried about the consequences. At the same time it started negotiations with Great Britain, France and Germany???negotiations that it thought would be quickly joined by the United States.
That did not happen. President Bush, at his news conference, misspoke when he said that the United States ???facilitated??? the European talks with Iran in 2003. In fact, then???under secretary of state John Bolton did nothing to help. He actively tried to sabotage the talks with leaks about threatening Iranian remarks to the Europeans. Bush also misspoke when he said that ???at that point in time??? (2003) his administration said it would stop blocking Iran???s application to join the World Trade Organization and provide spare parts for civilian airliners if Iran halted its program. Those carrots were not put on the table until 2005, shortly before Iranian presidential elections replaced Mohammad Khatami with the more belligerent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The United States did not offer to actually join the negotiations until May 2006???and only then if Iran suspended its uranium program.
Will Bush now pursue a diplomatic option more strenuously? New sanctions will be harder to achieve but it will be easier to justify talks with Tehran. At the very least, Bush will not bomb Iran before he leaves office. And that is something for which everyone around the world???not just the overstretched U.S. military???should be grateful.
Barbara Slavin is senior diplomatic reporter at USA Today on leave as a Jennings Randolph fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace and the author of Bitter Friends, Bosom Enemies: Iran, the U.S. and the Twisted Path to Confrontation (St. Martin???s Press, 2007).
http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20080101fa...ining-iran.html
In its May 2005 analysis, it said that it had "high confidence that Iran currently is determined to develop nuclear weapons". Yet that gloomy assessment was made, according to this week's report, when the nuclear programme had already been on hold for two years.
NPR.org, December 4, 2007 ?? The controversy over Iran's nuclear program is complicated by the fact that, although Iran said it had stopped researching nuclear weapons, it defied the United Nations by resuming an effort to enrich uranium.
Iranian officials said they wanted the enriched radioactive material as fuel for peaceful nuclear reactors. When President Bush and other administration officials accused Iran of seeking to develop a nuclear bomb, they often referred to Iran's uranium-enrichment program as proof.
Here's a timeline highlighting what was said and known about the program since early 2003:
February 2003: Inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the United Nations nuclear watchdog agency, find evidence that Iran has secretly begun enriching uranium.
May 2003: Iranian President Mohammed Khatami offers to talk to the United States about the countries' differences. But the Bush administration rejects the offer. In part because of this refusal, the Europeans act on their own to negotiate with the Iranians while trying to persuade the Bush administration to join the negotiation process.
October 2003: The EU 3 ??? France, Britain and Germany ??? reach an initial understanding with Iran to suspend nuclear enrichment. The Bush administration refuses to support this, insisting suspension of nuclear enrichment is not enough. The Bush administration insists that before it will enter into any negotiations with the Iranians, Iran must commit to abandoning enrichment all together.
November 2003: The IAEA announces that Iran has been violating its safeguards agreement under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. It accuses Tehran of failing to report that it was handling nuclear material and building facilities to process it. It says Iranian officials hid key parts of their nuclear program for nearly 20 years. The latest National Intelligence Estimate now says it believes "with high confidence" that the fall of 2003 was about the time Iran shut down a secret nuclear weapons program.
December 2003: After talks with the European Union, Iran agrees to allow IAEA inspectors to question its scientists and officials, review documents and visit some of its nuclear research and development facilities.
November 2004: Iran promises negotiators from the EU that it will suspend all its activities for processing nuclear fuel. Although Iran continues to deny that its activities have any military purpose, President Bush calls it a "nuclear weapons program," and chides Iran's leaders for suspending it, rather than ending it entirely. "Our position is that they ought to terminate their nuclear weapons program," Bush says.
February 2005: President Bush accuses Iran of being "the world's primary state sponsor of terror, pursuing nuclear weapons, while depriving its people of the freedom they seek and deserve."
June 2005: Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice says the United States will not support a third term for Mohammed ElBaradei as head of the IAEA unless he takes a harder line against Iran's nuclear program.
April 2006: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says Iranian scientists have successfully enriched uranium to the 3.5 percent level, pure enough to run a nuclear reactor. He says, "I am officially announcing that Iran has joined the group of those countries which have nuclear technology." Uranium for a nuclear bomb would require around 90 percent enrichment.
July 2006: The United Nations Security Council passes a resolution demanding that Iran suspend its nuclear enrichment activities or face international sanctions.
December 2006: The U.N. Security Council unanimously imposes sanctions on Iran for failure to halt its uranium enrichment program. It bans U.N. member states from providing Iran with equipment or technology that could be used in its nuclear program.
January 2007: IAEA head Mohammed ElBaradei calls for a "timeout" on the issue of Iran's nuclear program, saying the United Nations should suspend sanctions against Iran if Iran will freeze its nuclear program. He tells CNN, "The key to the Iranian issue is a direct engagement between Iran and the U.S., similar to North Korea."
Spring 2007: The National Intelligence Estimate was expected to be delivered to Congress during this period, but is repeatedly postponed as intelligence agencies re-assess information about Iran's nuclear program.
August 2007: President Bush says, "Iran's active pursuit of technology that could lead to nuclear weapons threatens to put a region already known for instability and violence under the shadow of a nuclear holocaust." The latest National Intelligence Estimate says, "we assess with moderate confidence Tehran had not restarted its nuclear weapons program as of mid-2007."
September 2007: U.S. intelligence officials, including CIA Director Michael Hayden, begin a reassessment of their information on Iran, according to unnamed officials quoted in the New York Times. The newspaper says White House officials knew at the time that the intelligence agencies were reviewing their conclusions, but did not know until later that those conclusions were drastically being changed.
October 2007: President Bush says, "we got a leader in Iran who has announced that he wants to destroy Israel. So I've told people that if you're interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them from having the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon."
November 2007: A final draft of the National Intelligence Estimate is presented to President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.
December 2007: A day after the National Intelligence Estimate is made public, President Bush says he was first told by Director of Intelligence Michael McConnell in August that there was new intelligence about Iran's nuclear program, but that he wasn't told what that new intelligence was at the time. President Bush, in a press conference, says he still regards Iran as "dangerous." He asks reporters, "What's to say they couldn't start another covert nuclear weapons program?"
I wonder how the authors of this article would react to the release of the new NIE.
While their basic premise may hold (engage rather than isolate Iran), you have to at least consider the possibility that Iran's 2003 halt to their development of nukes -- if indeed it was halted -- may have had something to do with the massing of US troops on their border as a direct result of Iraq's (alleged) pursuit of the same technology.
EDIT: oops, I misstyped.
http://www.csis.org/component/option,com_csis_pubs/task,view/id,4224/
bushset?
Can't the mods institute a "one alias to a customer" limit?
Little is mentioned about the fact that, thirty years ago, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, et al. were all putting forward the position that they should push to complete a multi-billion dollar deal with Iran to sell them both large quantities of plutonium and enriched uranium (the two pathways to a nuclear bomb). Why the sudden change of mind? Well, back then the US had installed a tyrannical dictator who ran Iran with an iron fist and did what he was told.
After failing to challenge anything the government said in the run-up to the Iraq invasion, the British press have been eager to whip up a frenzy for a new and equally unpopular war:
chill dude.
while no democrat, "tyrannical dictator" is somewhat of a mischaracterization of the Shah of Iran.
also there's thousands of Iranian immigrants here in the US who were quite fond of the guy. just something to think about.
Iraq has actualy been a boom for Iran
1) The US got rid of Iran's #1 enemy Saddam
2) Iran has a huge influence with the Shiites and Kurds that are now running Iraq
3) There's been a huge boom in business for Iran in Iraq with religious tourism to places like Karbala, Iran provides electricity for large parts of the south, has large trade with the Kurds
5) If the U.S. ever did attack Iran, Iraq is the best way for Iran to strike back
Overall, all the U.S. threats and positioning probably helped out the hard-liners within Iran as wekk,
Plus one report I heard said it was the European Union that pressured Iran to stop its nuclear weapons program.
There's no doubt Iran's regional position has been strengthened by the Iraq war. (Iran's regional position has been strengthened by the toppling of the Taliban also).
But like I said you have to at least consider the possibility that Iran's 2003 halt to their development of nukes -- if indeed it was halted -- may have had something to do with the massing of US troops on their border as a direct result of Iraq's (alleged) pursuit of the same technology.