Bypassing intelligence altogether
George Will writes about the Curveball fiasco and concludes that "as some Washington voices, many of them familiar, are reprising a familiar theme -- Iran's nuclear program is near a fruition that justifies preventive military action," the history of the admnistration's intelligence failures going into Iraq "explains one reason they will not be [heeded]."
What's happening right now vis-a-vis Iran, though, is quite a bit different than what was happening going into Iraq. A few months before the Iraq war began, we were being fed lies about solid intelligence reports that backed up the administration's most controversial claims--Iraq had bio-weapons labs, chemical munitions, the elements of a nascent nuclear program, and existing relations with a terrorist organization called Al Qaeda that had attacked the United States just one year earlier.
Today, the character-based indictments of the Iranian government coming out of Washington are serving as cover for the fact that we really have very little intelligence--good or bad--about Iran. Is Iran's nuclear program an early precursor of an atomic weapons program? Neither we nor the IAEA have seen any evidence of this, but what does it matter? Of course Iran wants--and wants to use--nuclear weapons. Are Iranian-built IEDs in Iraq being shipped to Shiite militias in Iraq on direct orders from Tehran? Hard to say. Also hard to find anybody itching for more bombing to acknowledge that this is an open question; it's Ahmadinejad and the mullahs, after all! And even if they're not directly behind the attacks, they sure don't seem too upset about it!
And as such, the risk is not that the administration is going to launch a full-scale invasion of Iran using the same sorts of misinformation tactics it used in 2002 and 2003. The risk is that the administration will allow one of these poorly understood issues to serve as a flashpoint for an air attack or a series of air attacks without any regard for whether the allegations have any merit or the attacks serve anybody's interests at all.
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Well, it isn't that Cheney hasn't tried to get the new, unreleased for over a year, National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran to do the same kind of fact-twisting that was engaged in for Iraq. Apparently, 'we don't know' is a stronger voice within the intelligence community than was the case in 2002. I recently noticed a news report somewhere in the US media on the new NIE, but now all I can find is this report from Asia Times - which says the same things the US report did.
Since the 'just the facts people' and Cheney's people can't agree to distort the evidence the way Cheney wants, the report will be released without the key findings. So, 'no conclusions' is now the path forward instead of bad conclusions. I guess that is progress, of some sort.
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