Intelligence on Iran

The National Intelligence Estimate came out this week, and the press are loving that it says Iran suspended its nuclear weapons program in 2003.

President Bush gave a news conference this morning that was informative and comedic. The press peppered him with questions about the NIE, and asked if this made him look the fool: Bush has said before that Iran could lead the world into a WWIII, but now the NIE says Iran's leaders are pussy cats.

Fascinating. The press have vilified the intelligence sector for the botched Iraq WMDs, and said that intelligence officials are morons at best, criminally negligent at worst. Yet now one report hits the desk that makes Iran look good (and, of course, Bush look bad) and the press are using the document as Bible study.

Bush did the only thing he could: he punted. He said that Iran is and always has been dangerous, and that this report shows that the Iranians did in fact have a nuclear weapons program. If the past few years of diplomatic pressure have made the Iranians call it off, so much the better.

The press weren't buying. David Gregory, NBC's reporter extrordinaire, took delight in paraphrasing Bush and saying that he had toned down his WWIII rhetoric. He then said that this new Bush junk sounded an awful lot like the past Bush junk: Bush could invade Iran anyway, under the "stop them before they have one" argument. Others in the front row of the briefing room asked the president if the rest of the world would now look at Bush as even more of a boob.

I don't give the NIE much import. Ahmandinejad is a holocaust denier that says Israel must be wiped off the map. If Iran was in fact conducting a nuke program up until 2003, it is pretty unlikely that the Iranians said, "Hmmm. We're unpopular at the UN. We should throw out everything we've learned and forget that we ever learned it."

Bush is right when he says Iran is a danger because they have acquired knowledge of how to build a bomb, and that they may transfer this knowledge to someone else. Just because Iran has stopped its own nuclear program does not mean that it won't hand over this vital information to any number of terrorist clients, if they haven't done so already.

The press have completely missed the point of the NIE document. Fact is, Iran was conducting a nuclear weapons program when they said they weren't. Though not quoted by the press corp, the document goes on to say that Iran could still develop a nuclear weapon by 2010.

The view of the press is that Bush is a fool and that the Iranians have turned good. This is the real danger of the NIE. Now that this news will be fanned for the next three weeks, Iran can do whatever they wish. Trying to convince the press later that Iran has restarted a nuke program or transferred the knowledge to someone else will be extremely difficult. Though they hang gays, stone women, and preach anti-Semitic hatred, the Iranian regime is suddenly a bunch of nice guys that have changed their evil ways.

The intelligence says so.