What “Is” Is
John Bolton on why the United States intelligence community, and its gleeful fans, have no clothes. Washington Post:
First, the headline finding — that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 — is written in a way that guarantees the totality of the conclusions will be misread. In fact, there is little substantive difference between the conclusions of the 2005 NIE on Iran’s nuclear capabilities and the 2007 NIE. Moreover, the distinction between “military” and “civilian” programs is highly artificial, since the enrichment of uranium, which all agree Iran is continuing, is critical to civilian and military uses. Indeed, it has always been Iran’s “civilian” program that posed the main risk of a nuclear “breakout.”
The real differences between the NIEs are not in the hard data but in the psychological assessment of the mullahs’ motives and objectives. The current NIE freely admits to having only moderate confidence that the suspension continues and says that there are significant gaps in our intelligence and that our analysts dissent from their initial judgment on suspension. This alone should give us considerable pause.
Strange, I didn’t notice that “only moderate confidence” part in the reporting the other day.
Second, the NIE is internally contradictory and insufficiently supported. It implies that Iran is susceptible to diplomatic persuasion and pressure, yet the only event in 2003 that might have affected Iran was our invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, not exactly a diplomatic pas de deux. As undersecretary of state for arms control in 2003, I know we were nowhere near exerting any significant diplomatic pressure on Iran. Nowhere does the NIE explain its logic on this critical point. Moreover, the risks and returns of pursuing a diplomatic strategy are policy calculations, not intelligence judgments. The very public rollout in the NIE of a diplomatic strategy exposes the biases at work behind the Potemkin village of “intelligence.”
This, of course, is the big problem with all the claims that Bush is warmongering when diplomacy will do the job. The false notion that diplomacy did the job, quite aside from the notion that the job was done.
Third, the risks of disinformation by Iran are real. We have lost many fruitful sources inside Iraq in recent years because of increased security and intelligence tradecraft by Iran. The sudden appearance of new sources should be taken with more than a little skepticism. In a background briefing, intelligence officials said they had concluded it was “possible” but not “likely” that the new information they were relying on was deception. These are hardly hard scientific conclusions. One contrary opinion came from — of all places — an unnamed International Atomic Energy Agency official, quoted in the New York Times, saying that “we are more skeptical. We don’t buy the American analysis 100 percent. We are not that generous with Iran.” When the IAEA is tougher than our analysts, you can bet the farm that someone is pursuing a policy agenda.
No kidding. Bush was publicly castigated for supposedly distorting intelligence to serve his political ends. The intelligence community was castigated for allowing itself to be used. Sounds like a new round of castigation might be in order.
In closing, there’s this:
While the president and others argue that we need to maintain pressure on Iran, this “intelligence” torpedo has all but sunk those efforts, inadequate as they were. Ironically, the NIE opens the way for Iran to achieve its military nuclear ambitions in an essentially unmolested fashion, to the detriment of us all.
No wonder they ran Bolton out of government. He’s dangerous. When everything depends on what, by the Clintonian measure, your definition “is” is, he has very clearly stated what it most definitely isn’t … any improvement in world security re Iran as a result of a re-parsing of intelligence conclusions.
Meanwhile, the New York Times offers some detail on the intel that led to the estimate:
WASHINGTON, Dec. 5 — American intelligence agencies reversed their view about the status of Iran’s nuclear weapons program after they obtained notes last summer from the deliberations of Iranian military officials involved in the weapons development program, senior intelligence and government officials said on Wednesday.
The notes included conversations and deliberations in which some of the military officials complained bitterly about what they termed a decision by their superiors in late 2003 to shut down a complex engineering effort to design nuclear weapons, including a warhead that could fit atop Iranian missiles.
The newly obtained notes contradicted public assertions by American intelligence officials that the nuclear weapons design effort was still active. But according to the intelligence and government officials, they give no hint of why Iran’s leadership decided to halt the covert effort.
Ultimately, the notes and deliberations were corroborated by other intelligence, the officials said, including intercepted conversations among Iranian officials, collected in recent months. It is not clear if those conversations involved the same officers and others whose deliberations were recounted in the notes, or if they included their superiors.
So this is based on what Iranians are saying about their nuke program, as opposed to, as Bolton noted, what they are actually doing. That’s interesting. That reminds me that an entire chapter of “Bush Lied” was based on an amateur spook’s chat with his pals in Niger. Don’t worry. NYT reports that the CIA put a “Red Team” on it to make sure no one was pulling CIA’s leg. Meanwhile, here’s a “only moderate confidence” sighting, buried somewhat:
In fact, some in the intelligence agencies appear to be not fully convinced that the notes of the deliberations indicated that all aspects of the weapons program had been shut down.
The crucial judgments released on Monday said that while “we judge with high confidence that the halt lasted at least several years,” it also included the warning that “intelligence gaps discussed elsewhere in this Estimate” led both the Department of Energy and the National Intelligence Council “to assess with only moderate confidence that the halt to those activities represents a halt to Iran’s entire nuclear weapons program.”
Meanwhile,
“Bush has made a big mistake, and he’s not responding in a way that gives confidence that he’s on top of this,” said David Albright, a former weapons inspector for the International Atomic Eenergy Agency and president of the Institute for Science and International Security. “He isn’t able to respond because he’s not able to say he’s wrong.”
That may be because at last check, aside from anti-Bush partisans in and out of Iran, no one thinks he is, not least an alliance that includes usually less enthusiastic European nations.
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 7:51 am Comments (7) on Thursday, December 6, 2007
7 Responses to “What “Is” Is”
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December 6th, 2007 at 2:01 pm
Aside from handing the enemy another information coup they could never attain on their own, this report has now made it impossible for us to do anything about Iran until the missiles fly and thousands die.
I am curious how those who denigrated the earlier NIE reports now justify swearing on them like the bible.
December 6th, 2007 at 2:01 pm
As undersecretary of state for arms control in 2003, I know we were nowhere near exerting any significant diplomatic pressure on Iran. Nowhere does the NIE explain its logic on this critical point. Moreover, the risks and returns of pursuing a diplomatic strategy are policy calculations, not intelligence judgments. The very public rollout in the NIE of a diplomatic strategy exposes the biases at work behind the Potemkin village of “intelligence.”
Good old John (”too blunt and honest for the UN”) Bolton.
December 6th, 2007 at 2:40 pm
If anything, this new NIE has made war with Iran more likely rather than less.
December 6th, 2007 at 10:18 pm
I’ve quoted you and linked to you here: http://consul-at-arms.blogspot.com/2007/12/re-what-is-is.html
December 6th, 2007 at 11:19 pm
Hammer on the nail, Rebecca. Let’s hear it for the retards that wrote this NIE!!!
December 7th, 2007 at 2:21 am
You are absolutely right, Rebecca. With this from the analysts (does anyone remember the last time they were right?), Secretary Rice’s reckless speeding down the dead-end “road to peace in the Middle East,” and the latest act out of the Senate to cut CO2 emissions by 70% (with no new drilling, no new nuclear power plants, and probable rationing), and a lame-duck president who has lost whatever control over the administration he once had, I’m not looking forward to a happy and prosperous new year. These are not serious people and we are going to end up in a devastating war that makes “Bush’s war” look like a cake walk. If we have enough of an economy left with which to fight, that is.
December 7th, 2007 at 11:57 am
More in today’s WaPo.
Pretty shitty stuff, if true.
Critics of the NIE have seized on the fact that career government officials who had battled with conservatives earlier in the administration on policy issues have now migrated to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), which coordinated the writing of the estimate.
“The problem is not the nature of the intelligence, it’s the nature of the presentation. This NIE was presented with a clear intention to deceive and to redirect foreign policy,”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/06/AR2007120602457.html