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| Misreading the Iran Report |
| 2007-12-14 |
| Why Spying and Policymaking Don't Mix By Henry A. Kissinger The extraordinary spectacle of the president's national security adviser obliged to defend the president's Iran policy against a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) raises two core issues: How are we now to judge the nuclear threat posed by Iran? How are we to judge the intelligence community's relationship with the White House and the rest of the government? The "Key Judgments" released by the intelligence community last week begin with a dramatic assertion: "We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program." This sentence was widely interpreted as a challenge to the Bush administration policy of mobilizing international pressure against alleged Iranian nuclear programs. It was, in fact, qualified by a footnote whose complex phraseology obfuscated that the suspension really applied to only one aspect of the Iranian nuclear weapons program (and not even the most significant one): the construction of warheads. That qualification was not restated in the rest of the document, which continued to refer to the "halt of the weapons program" repeatedly and without qualification. The reality is that the concern about Iranian nuclear weapons has had three components: the production of fissile material, the development of missiles and the building of warheads. Heretofore, production of fissile material has been treated as by far the greatest danger, and the pace of Iranian production of fissile material has accelerated since 2006. So has the development of missiles of increasing range. What appears to have been suspended is the engineering aimed at the production of warheads. |
| Posted by:Steve White |
| #7 Yes, and yes D.R.M. Yesterday one of our Rantburgers mentioned that the missiles themselves are just renamed North Korean ones... and one of Saddam Hussein's researchers had buried the plans for the Iraqi nukes under his rosebushes. And Saddam Hussein's war gasses were found post-invasion stored in barrels labelled "Insecticide". |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2007-12-14 12:46 |
| #6 Could the Iranians have suspended warhead enginieering (if they did) because they got the plans, tooling, and know-how from someone else who already had it? Could it be hidden if they did? |
| Posted by: D. R. M. 2007-12-14 12:37 |
| #5 The CIA is broken. Disband it, parcel out operations to the DIA, electronics to the NSA, overhead to the NRO, and reformulate it as a HUMINT-only and small-scale direct action agency. Put the most of the analysis, especially fusion analysis, at DNI as an "uber" agency. USe the old soviet system for analysis: prepare 3 sets of analysis: Best case, Worst case and Middle Case. Present Middle, with footnotes to best and worst. |
| Posted by: OldSpook 2007-12-14 12:21 |
| #4 Henry's a snake, but he's a smart, interesting snake who sees things clearly. He understands that it's not the job of the CIA to make politics -- that's the job of elected officials and their designated servants (e.g., him when he was SoS). I think the fools at CIA who've been orchestrating the hit pieces on Dubya tipped their hand too much this time. There's going to be blowback. |
| Posted by: Steve White 2007-12-14 11:31 |
| #3 Henry Kissinger has spoken against the NIE and those who wrote it? In the Washington post, which is what those people read and believe? Oh dear. Seafarious, please, please, please go to a dinner party or two this weekend and report back on the conversation! |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2007-12-14 10:12 |
| #2 The people responsible for this type of political manipulation need to be fired. Out of a cannon. |
| Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2007-12-14 09:45 |
| #1 The people responsible for this type of political manipulation need to be fired. |
| Posted by: Whomong Guelph4611 2007-12-14 04:54 |