Aspirational Cognition
Theory misunderstood by someone who actually thinks U.S. intelligence is supposed to be a tool of foreign policy, not domestic politics. Get real(politik)! Kissinger at Washington Post goes to the chalkboard, does long division on the NIE. Talk about old school: Â
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?
Where’s the old guy been for the last seven years? There have been great advances in our understanding of Reality-tivity, primarily as a result of the now widely accepted theory that Bush = greatest threat to world peace. A key to understanding this is to recognize that intelligence estimates will be treated as fact for purposes of domestic political advantage, to the extent that they coincide with underlying assumptions and aspirational cognition.*  Â
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.
Kissinger clearly doesn’t understand that intelligence is as intelligence does, to paraphrase Forest Gump. For example, because every major intelligence agency in the world in 2003 believed Saddam Hussein had an active nuclear weapons program, Bush lied, people died. It’s just that simple.
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.
Details.
The NIE holds that Iran may be able to produce enough highly enriched uranium for a nuclear weapon by the end of 2009 and, with increasing confidence, more warheads by the period 2010 to 2015. That is virtually the same timeline as was suggested in the 2005 National Intelligence Estimate.
Semantics.
It is therefore doubtful that the evidence supports the dramatic language of the summary and, even less so, the broad conclusions drawn in much of the public commentary.
Kissinger, whose tenure greatly preceded the period before Jimmy Carter and Mikhael Gorbachev ended the Cold War, is clearly caught in a Strangelovian time-warp and doesn’t understand the new math of threat assessment, which has transcended prior limitations and restrictions. It can be most readily grasped by this simple formula:
(Intelligence community wrong about Saddam) + (Intelligence community wrong about Iran) =Â __________
(A) Intelligence community right.
(B) Intelligence community left.
(C) Intelligence community (politically) correct.
(D)Â All of the above.
Please show your erroneous assumptions.
Kissinger would rather make a word problem out of it:
The NIE then highlights, without altering, the underlying issue: At what point would the nations that have described an Iranian military nuclear program as “unacceptable” agree to act on that conviction? Do they wait until Iran starts producing nuclear warheads? Does our intelligence assume that we will know this threshold? Is there then enough time for meaningful countermeasures? What happens to the growing stock of fissile material that, according to the estimate, will have been accumulated? Do we run the risk of finding ourselves with an adversary that, in the end, agrees to stop further production of fissile material but insists on retaining the existing stockpile as a potential threat?
He’s not exactly asking the intelligence community to show its work. But, again demonstrating his ignorance of modern principles, he wonders whether it did any:
For example, the document says: “We judge 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 extrapolates from that judgment that Iran “is less determined to develop nuclear weapons than we have been judging since 2005″ and that it “may be more vulnerable to influence on the issue than we judged previously.”
It is to be hoped that the full estimate provides more comprehensive evidence for these conclusions. A more plausible alternative explanation would assign greater significance to the regional context and American actions. When Iran halted its weapons program and suspended efforts at enriching uranium in February 2003, America had already occupied Afghanistan and was on the verge of invading Iraq, both of which border Iran. The United States justified its Iraq policy by the need to remove weapons of mass destruction from the region. By the fall of 2003, when Iran voluntarily joined the Additional Protocol for Nuclear Non-Proliferation, Saddam Hussein had just been overthrown. Is it unreasonable to assume that the ayatollahs concluded that restraint had become imperative? By the fall of 2005, the American effort in Iraq showed signs of bogging down; the prospects for extending the enterprise into Iran were diminishing. Iranian leaders could have felt free to return to their policy of building up a military nuclear capability — perhaps reinforced by the desire to create a deterrent to American regional aspirations. They might also have concluded, because the secret effort had leaked, that it would be too dangerous to undertake another covert program. Hence the emphasis on renewing the enrichment program in the guise of a civilian energy program. In short, if my analysis is correct, we could be witnessing not a halt of the Iranian weapons program — as the NIE asserts — but a subtle, ultimately more dangerous, version of it that will phase in the warhead when fissile material production has matured.
Kissinger confuses the matter by introducing dated, discredited physics. Specifically, Apron-String Theory:
I am extremely concerned about the tendency of the intelligence community to turn itself into a kind of check on, instead of a part of, the executive branch. When intelligence personnel expect their work to become the subject of public debate, they are tempted into the roles of surrogate policymakers and advocates. Thus the deputy director for intelligence estimates explained the release of the NIE as follows: Publication was chosen because the estimate conflicted with public statements by top U.S. officials about Iran, and “we felt it was important to release this information to ensure that an accurate presentation is available.” That may explain releasing the facts but not the sources and methods that have been flooding the media. The paradoxical result of the trend toward public advocacy is to draw intelligence personnel more deeply than ever into the public maelstrom.
Maybe that’s more social science. In any case, it lacks any multi-cultural sensitivity whatsoever and fails to appreciate that of significantly greater concern than any theoretical threat we might cognitively aspire not to think about, is why they hate us. Clearly absent in all of Kissinger’s calculations is any understanding of Rove-Cheney Dark Matter Theory, primarily the core axiom that Bush lied, therefore people died.
Ha! Powerline remembers when lefties used to fear the intelligence community’s influence on our political institutions.
UPDATE: Byron00 in comments notes the following K statement with alarm.
What is required is a specific vision linking assurances for Iran’s security and respect for its identity with an Iranian foreign policy compatible with the existing order in the Middle East. But it must also generate an analysis of the strategy to be pursued should Iran, in the end, choose ideology over reconciliation.
It is my cognitive aspiration that the old guy is realpolitikly giving the peace-at-all-costs camp a diplomatic out with this remark, as we know the mullahs are unlikely to choose reconciliation as long as they’ve got any ideology left in the tank, and K notes the need for an alternative strategy should the desired ideology-reconciliation shift fail to take place. It is also noteworthy that the eminence geezer makes this remark with a graph or two of pointing out that the presumed scaling back of the weapons program, which he doubts has actually happened in any but a deceptive way, followed highly aggressive anti-WMD and regime-change actions on Iran’s flanks.
By “existing order in the Middle East,” I suspect the K is refering to the region’s current non-Iranian-dominated order, though Byron00 is quite right in that the current order is unacceptably and criminally Iranian-influenced at present. Respect for Iran’s identity and security assurances don’t happen until Iranian foreign policy gets compatible. You may cognize aspirationally, but don’t hold your breath. Â
* wishful thinking.
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 8:07 am on Thursday, December 13, 2007
5 Responses to “Aspirational Cognition”
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December 13th, 2007 at 10:10 am
“What is required is a specific vision linking assurances for Iran’s security and respect for its identity with an Iranian foreign policy compatible with the existing order in the Middle East.”
Whoa, I thought the “existing order in the Middle East” was the problem.
And what is it about the Iranian regime that make us want to provide “assurances for Iran’s security and respect for its identity”? It seems to me we should be doing what we can to support and encourage the internal opposition to the Iranian terror-supporting mullahocracy.
December 13th, 2007 at 12:57 pm
By the fall of 2003, when Iran voluntarily joined the Additional Protocol for Nuclear Non-Proliferation
signed, but I think it is something of an excuse that Iranian Parliamentary approval or something was never effected (so “joined” might be a stretch)
I am extremely concerned about the tendency of the intelligence community to turn itself into a kind of check on, instead of a part of, the executive branch…surrogate policymakers and advocates
Me, too.
Isn’t the arming/construction of the nuclear warhead one of the most difficult parts of making a weapon ?
Anyone ever suggest that IF the Iranians look like they are yielding to international pressure in the realm of development of a nuclear weapon, wouldn’t a prudent person have to assume that there might well be a pragmatic (weapons development difficulty) reason underlying that symbolic gesture of cooperation ?
I can assure you A’jad gets a big kick out of these games.
Let’s have a little chaos, maybe some genuine boom boom in the Middle East and hasten the “return” of A’jad’s guy who will once and for all time impose Allah’s justice on this weary Earth.
December 13th, 2007 at 2:23 pm
There was a little interesting international event which preceded the abandonment of some aspect of the Iranian nuclear war preparation. Oddly, it also preceded the abandonment by Muhamar Khaddafi of Libya’s nuclear ambitions.
The US led an invasion of Iraq because the UN, all the world’s intelligence agencies and the US Congress agreed that Saddam Hussein was a potential nuclear military threat, all the more because he obstructed inspection of the sites at which this nuclear preparation were underway.
What a remarkable coincidence.
December 14th, 2007 at 11:25 am
Web Reconnaissance for 12/14/2007
A short recon of what’s out there that might draw your attention, updated throughout the day…so check back often.
December 16th, 2007 at 1:36 am
Tanstaafl,
The design and construction of an implosion bomb (Plutonium) is difficult, but that of an enriched Uranium bomb is not. With U you just shoot one piece of U metal into another to form a critical mass. The Hiroshima bomb was of this type and we did not bother to test one, the design was so straightforward. With all the U the Iranians are enriching they could build such a bomb soon (that is the 2009 bomb referred to in the post I think) and the only test would be when they drop it on Tel Aviv.
After the idiot NIE and the idiot Annapolis Conference and the idiot State Department praise for Baby Assad it looks like the US is abandoning its aims in the Middle East and abandoning any resistance to Iran. Thus the states over there are starting to appease Iran. This will make it harder to settle things in Iraq, if the Shi’a there figure they need to appease Iran and truckle to the Mullahs to cover their asses, now the USA has abandoned its previous policies. If you want realpolitik, the Arabs will give it to you, more than you can stomach.
Let’s abolish the CIA and start over with a military intel outfit, and purge the State Department of the careerists and time-servers who have been sabotaging the foreign policy of the elected government of the USA.