As I Was Saying // Ben Frankel Of facts and wishful thinking in the Iran debate

Some football teams win because of their quarterback, other teams win regardless of their quarterback, and others yet win despite of their quarterback. If the United States were to formulate the right and most effective policy toward Iran’s nuclear weapons program, would it be because, regardless, or despite of the insights and advice of the U.S. intelligence community?

This is a fair question to ask even as we recognize the many dedicated and hard-working people in the U.S. intelligence family (we note that Tim Weiner, in his definitive Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA [2007], gives an unequivocal, and less than charitable, answer to the question of how accurate the CIA’s assessments of different cold war-era developments were, and how helpful these assessments were to U.S. decision makers).

It is a fair question because the intelligence community appears to have gotten it wrong three times when it comes to nuclear weapons proliferation in the Middle East:

• The community missed the advances Iraq made in its nuclear weapons program — indeed, in its WMD program more generally — during the 1980s. The United States, and the world, were thus surprised at the depth and breadth of Saddam’s WMD program, and many of the discoveries of the UN inspectors between 1991 and 1998 were complete news to analysts whose job it was to follow these very programs.
• Under unprecedented pressure from Vice President Dick Cheney and the parallel intelligence unit Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld established at the Pentagon, CIA’s analysts were arm-twisted and browbeaten, and the director of agency, George Tenet, cajoled and sweet-talked, into producing a “Slam Dunk” analysis of Iraq’s WMD capabilities which bore no relationship to reality. The CIA wrote the speech which Secretary of State Colin Powell gave at the UN Security Council on 5 February 2003 — a speech we now know is largely fiction. There were no WMD in Iraq, and Saddam had not “reconstituted” (Cheney’s words) his WMD program (on the Iraqi WMD issue, see the views of two former weapon inspectors: the just-published Hide and Seek: The Search for Truth in Iraq by Charles Duelfer, and David Kay’s 3 October 2003 testimony before Congress).
• If the intelligence community’s treatment of Iraq’s WMD capabilities was corrupted by political pressures from certain segments in the Bush administration to hype the Iraqi threat, then the case of the November 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) was one of corrupting the intelligence process in order to down-play the Iranian nuclear threat. The State Department’s analysts who were shushed or