The Iran NIE: Resetting the nuclear clock, not stopping it

December 6, 2007

The new U.S. National Intelligence Estimate on Iran's nuclear development has itself hit like an atomic bomb of sorts.

The NIE's most immediate implication is that U.S. military strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities are not in the offing. Not because the NIE claims Iran will not go nuclear, but because it claims Iran is at least two years away from enriching uranium enough to build a bomb. The military option will only ever be a last resort, and a period of at least two years is outside the "red line" for last resorts.

The 2005 NIE found that Iran could produce enough highly enriched uranium for a weapon "early-to-mid next decade," and "by the end of this decade" at the earliest; the new NIE foresees Iran crossing that weaponization threshold "during the 2010-2015 time frame," with an earliest possible date of "late 2009." So both forecasts agree on timelines, and the nearest point-of-no-return is now only two years out.

The good news is that, if the report is correct, we have a window of opportunity for non-military solutions to the Iran problem.

If the NIE is correct, we need not worry for now about air strikes harming innocents or alienating the pro-Western people of Iran. We need not worry for now about an Iranian retaliation to air strikes, whether upsetting the newfound peace in Iraq, targeting Western soldiers in the region, driving the price of oil even higher, or unleashing terror attacks against Israeli or Western civilians.

And most importantly, if the NIE is correct, we need not worry for now about Iran announcing the detonation of the world's first Islamist nuclear bomb.

The bad news is that National Intelligence Estimates are notoriously faulty. They don't call them "estimates" for nothing.

The catalogue of flawed U.S. intelligence in the past two decades includes the failure to envision the fall of the Soviet Union, the underestimation of Iraq's WMD capabilities before the 1991 Gulf War, the overestimation of those same capabilities before the 2003 Iraq War, and the failure to anticipate the 9/11 attacks and the current global war.

So there is no particular reason, without the benefit of hindsight, to believe that this NIE is some final word in accuracy and analysis. Especially as it neglects Iran's work on heavy water and longer-range ballistic missiles. But, as of now, the new NIE is the best we've got. It is the most current assessment of the U.S. intelligence agencies on the central intelligence question of the time.

The NIE finds that Iran suspended its nuclear program in 2003, and even Israeli officials skeptical of the report agree on that point. 2003 of course coincides with the war to end the Saddam Hussein regime, just across the border from Iran, and largely as a result of Iraq's WMD defiance. President Bush had recently declared Iran part of an "Axis of Evil," along with Iraq, so Iran may have feared that it was next up on the hit list. And Libya was persuaded by Saddam Hussein's example to abandon its WMD program; Iran may have drawn a similar lesson.

But that was 2003. A lot has happened since. Iraq is in hand today, but by the start of this year there was a real possibility of an American withdrawal and defeat there. If American victory in Iraq deterred WMD development, then the prospect of American defeat was presumably having the opposite effect, and by 2005, Iran had resumed its uranium enrichment.

Bizarrely, the NIE credits "international scrutiny and pressure" for Iran's nuclear freeze in fall, 2003, but there had been no such international efforts by the fall of '03. What there had been was the recent example of regime-change in Iraq.

The NIE also finds that Iran has not restarted its nuclear weapons program since 2003, and it is on this point that the Israelis, the NIE's critics, and the 2005 NIE, disagree. The Iranians themselves boast that they are enriching uranium in thousands of centrifuges -- as would be necessary for building a bomb -- and the NIE does not disagree, except to claim that the enrichment is going slowly. So the finding that Iran's "nuclear weapons program" has been halted, but that its uranium enrichment continues, may be splitting hairs. The uranium enrichment would be the biggest part of a weapons program.

The report of slow progress on Iran's nuclear development has been readily received as a defeat for the United States or the Bush Administration. But U.S. and Administration policy is that Iran must not have nuclear weapons. In any less poisonous political environment, a finding that the policy is being realized might even be treated as a small victory, if not a new vindication of the Iraq intervention.

The danger of the NIE is that it will be abused by the Iran appeasers as proof the Islamic Republic is as pure as the driven snow, and give them an excuse for dropping the diplomatic pressure on Iran, let alone even the feeblest threat of military action. The NIE confirms that Iran continues enriching uranium, which is the stuff nuclear weapons are made of, and predicts Iran could have the bomb in as little as two years. But the NIE also allows that the West has time -- not to carry on as usual, but to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear Islamist theocracy, by non-military means. If we do not use this time to halt Iran's nuclear drive diplomatically, we will sooner or later be back to bracing for the military option.

Published in The Chronicle-Herald, Halifax, Nova Scotia

Andrew Smith / Andrew W. Smith, Tulsa, Oklahoma and Cape Sable Island, Nova Scotia

The Iran conundrum - "Inaction could be catastrophic, and anything less than the most finely-calibrated action could be calamitous as well"

There has been a real reluctance in the West's confrontation with Iran, and the reasons go beyond the most superficial ones -- the burden of existing commitments in Afghanistan and Iraq or the usual dissent within the West on how best to proceed.

Making matters murkier is that Iran is such a formidable nation. Territorially vast, more populous than Aghanistan and Iraq combined, with the world's second-largest crude oil reserves at a time when oil is an especially good thing to have. Iran has a sophisticated and dedicated military, and sustained a brutal war with Iraq lasting eight years and costing 300,000 Iranian lives, a scant two decades ago. It has a unique language and Persian core population, and an ancient culture with imperial traditions of regional domination. Not to mention, the more permanent parts of the Iranian government are at the same time fanatically anti-Western and constitutionally unconstrained.

The hesitation in dealing with Iran more forcefully also comes from an understanding that the Iranian people are some of the most Western-oriented and savvy in the region, perfectly capable of managing their own affairs in a decent, democratic fashion. It is tragic that a nation which might as easily be a great friend and ally, has ended up one of our most challenging threats. That Iran would become the first modern Islamic theocracy is itself a sad irony: Islamic government ought to be a poor fit for Iran, with its tradition of secular government reaching back some two-and-a-half thousand years.

So there is a sober respect and indeed fear of what Iran would be capable of in retaliation for military strikes on its nuclear production, and a worry that even limited Western air strikes could stir some nationalist reaction and make enemies of the otherwise pro-Western Iranian people. Those have made good arguments against the military option.

What has changed in the past months is the addition to the old equation of a new realization, that Iran is on the attack already: increasingly, without provocation, and with near-impunity.

As of August, about half the attacks on Coalition forces in Iraq have been Iranian-supported. Iran is shelling Iraqi Kurdish territory and threatening invasion. It is arming, training, and funding Iraqi insurgents as well as arming the Taliban in Afghanistan, and its weaponry is the most advanced in the insurgents' arsenals. Iran has even flooded southern Iraq with bogus voters to boost support for its client parties. Hezbollah, Iran's terrorist arm, threatens Israel and subverts Lebanon's democracy. Iran props up Hamas in Gaza and sponsors Islamic Jihad. Even the forces of the genocidal, rogue government of Sudan are considered worthy of training and support by the Iranian theocracy. Iran could probably do worse, but it is wreaking havoc enough already.

At the behest of the Iraqi government, the United States started diplomatic discussions with Iran, reportedly limited to the subject of Iraqi stability. But since those talks began, Iran has actually increased its efforts to sabotage Iraqi peace and democracy, doing little to vindicate the faith in diplomacy for dealing with Iran.

A widely-circulated September 2 report in The Times of London claimed that U.S. plans for a possible Iran attack were to strike not only Iran's nuclear facilities but also its military. Such reports appear with some frequency and are impossible to verify, but this particular story does have the advantage of squaring with some of what can be known. The Iranian military has made itself an active enemy in Iraq especially, it would be very capable of retaliation after any attack, and it is the theocrats' defenders against a popular uprising. All arguments for targeting Iran's military as well as its nuclear capacity in any Iran hit.

Then there is U.S. Executive Order 13224. The Washington Post broke a story last month of the Bush administration’s intention to name Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps a "specially designated global terrorist entity." It would be an extraordinary move. Classifying an official force of a nation state as a terrorist organization is without precedent. But the suit certainly fits. The Revolutionary Guard and its elite, expeditionary Quds Force are the outfits responsible for aiding Iraqi insurgents, the Taliban, Hezbollah, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad.

The Executive Order would squeeze the Revolutionary Guard's substantial international financing. Section 6 of the Order could conceivably also lay a legal foundation for military action against the Guard, but at the very least, the terrorist designation would be a signal of seriousness from Washington.

Another possible indication of new seriousness was noted by the veteran commentator Arnaud de Borchgrave. When the new French President Nicolas Sarkozy made his remarkable and blunt foreign policy speech recently, warning that the consequences of diplomacy without results would be "an Iranian bomb or the bombing of Iran," it was shortly after Sarkozy had met with President Bush.

It is a reasonable guess that the Administration has been focused on Iraq, and informed that Iran is not yet at the point of no return in its nuclear project, so it has been enough for now to encourage the domestic opposition to Iran's theocracy, experiment with the diplomatic and economic measures, and hope for some development to intervene before military strikes become necessary, all the while planning and preparing for the military contingencies.

The Iran case is a conundrum. A dangerous enemy with a friendly population that defies clear prescriptions. Inaction could be catastrophic, and anything less than the most finely-calibrated action could be calamitous as well. But the Iranian assault is making things very slightly clearer as the days pass. Action against Iran can only become more likely as Iran continues in its genocidal rhetoric, doomsday-minded drive for the bomb, and now the region-wide offensive against the West it has launched despite our best efforts to decline the fight.

Andrew W. Smith, Tulsa, Oklahoma and Cape Sable Island, Nova Scotia

Published in The Chronicle-Herald, Halifax, Nova Scotia

All fun and games at The Daily Show

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart is of course partisan potshotting -- not so much funny as validating -- with occasional actual comedy material, and not serious military analysis. But one wishes the writers and host would either show some humility in the area of military matters or else take the few minutes required to study the issue before taking their smarmy, obnoxious, ignorant, and unfunny two cents' worth to the air.

On the February 15 show, scorn was heaped on the Administration for its long-overdue statements that Iran has been supplying arms and more to Iraqi insurgents, especially the Shiite militias. The story of Iranian sponsorship of the troubles in Iraq, and particularly Iran's supplying of advanced military-grade roadside bombs, is a year and a half old; I wrote about it five months ago and thought it was a little behind the curve then. (Paragraphs 10, 11, and 12. See also this MSNBC story from 2005.)

This is a very serious business. The bombs in question, called shaped charges, can penetrate American tank armor. They have killed 170+ American soldiers who would have been safe against lesser weaponry. They are not the sort of thing rag-tag, ne'er-do-well, part-time militiamen can throw together with some hardware supplies. And they bear the demarcations of official Iranian armament factories and have actually been intercepted en route to Iraq from Iran.

The leader of the dominant Shiite militia, Muqtada al-Sadr, has in the past few days fled the current American offensive, to Iran's capitol, and yet the oh-so-clever Daily Show folks evidently believe the Iranian government would have had nothing to do with arming his militia.

This is not some political game, or frivolous late-night comedy fodder. The Daily Show is in far over its head here. Iran is fighting a declared albeit low-intensity war against America, and working towards worse. Surely the jokes can be found elsewhere.