Bush Succeeds in Disarming Iran

Apparently another Islamic regime has made the same decision that Libya’s Qaddafi made when we waged pre-emptive war in Iraq. The latest National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) report indicates that, despite their bluster, Iran has stopped, as of 2003 or so, actively pursuing a nuclear weapon, although they have continued a program of enrichment that will eventually lead to a bomb-making capability. This makes three nations that our military might and our diplomacy have convinced to back off from developing nuclear weapons – Libya, North Korea and Iran.

Why Ahmadinejad, as did Saddam Hussein before him, continues to engage in such bluster and threats to incinerate Israel and defeat the United States, is a mystery, and may be something in the Islamic mentality that we westerners will never understand.

Another possibility is that the NIE is wrong.

Dark Suspicions about the NIE
Norman Podhoretz - 12.03.2007 - Commentary

A new National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), entitled “Iran: Nuclear Intentions and Capabilities,” has just dealt a serious blow to the argument some of us have been making that Iran is intent on building nuclear weapons and that neither diplomacy nor sanctions can prevent it from succeeding. Thus, this latest NIE “judges with high confidence that in fall 2003 Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program”; it “judges with high confidence that the halt was directed primarily in response to increasing international scrutiny and pressure resulting from exposure of Iran’s previously undeclared nuclear work”; it “assesses with moderate confidence that Tehran had not restarted its nuclear weapons program as of mid-2007”; it assesses, also with only “moderate confidence that the halt to those activities represents a halt to Iran’s entire nuclear weapons program”; but even if not, it judges “with high confidence that Iran will not be technically capable of producing and reprocessing enough plutonium for a weapon before about 2015.”

These findings are startling, not least because in key respects they represent a 180-degree turn from the conclusions of the last NIE on Iran’s nuclear program. For that one, issued in May 2005, assessed “with high confidence that Iran currently is determined to develop nuclear weapons” and to press on “despite its international obligations and international pressure.”

In other words, a full two years after Iran supposedly called a halt to its nuclear program, the intelligence community was still as sure as it ever is about anything that Iran was determined to build a nuclear arsenal. Why then should we believe it when it now tells us, and with the same “high confidence,” that Iran had already called a halt to its nuclear-weapons program in 2003? Similarly with the intelligence community’s reversal on the effectiveness of international pressure. In 2005, the NIE was highly confident that international pressure had not lessened Iran’s determination to develop nuclear weapons, and yet now, in 2007, the intelligence community is just as confident that international pressure had already done the trick by 2003. Excerpt; See Rest At: From Sea to Shining Sea