Of facts and wishful thinking in the Iran debate

ignored in 2002 and early 2003 had their revenge in 2007: Fearing that the Bush administration was planning an attack on Iran’s nuclear weapons facilities, they helped produce the infamous November 2007 NIE which claimed that Iran had “halted” its nuclear weapons design program in 2003. We never concealed our views of the quality of that document. In February 2008 we wrote that the NIE document was “strange, misleading, and poorly timed.” We were joined in this assessment by the very bosses of the team which produced the NIE — then-Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell and then-CIA Director Michael Hayden. McConnell admitted, in a March 2008 testimony in Congress, that the “wording” of the December NIE was poor, and that inferences drawn from it that Iran had stopped its relentless march toward the bomb were wrong. As for Hayden: “CIA Director Michael V. Hayden said Sunday that he believes Iran is still pursuing a nuclear bomb, even though the U.S. intelligence community, including his own agency, reached a consensus judgment last year that the Islamic Republic had halted its nuclear weapons work in 2003” (Los Angeles Times, 31 March 2008).

We are reminded of the poor record of the U.S. intelligence community when it comes to assessing nuclear weapons proliferation trends in the Middle East because Dennis Blair, the U.S. Director of National Intelligence (DNI), warned today that it will be “difficult” to convince Iran to give up its quest for nuclear weapons through diplomatic means. Tehran might bow to a blend of “credible” incentives and “threats of intensified international scrutiny and pressures,” but “it is difficult to specify what such a combination might be,” Blair told lawmakers.

His comments, in testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee, came as President Barack Obama wrestled with how to convince the Islamic republic to halt what the West views as a secret nuclear weapons drive.

“Although we do not know whether Iran currently intends to develop nuclear weapons, we assess Tehran at a minimum is keeping open the option to develop them,” said Blair. “We assess convincing the Iranian leadership to forego the eventual development of nuclear weapons will be difficult, given the linkage many within the leadership see between nuclear weapons and Iran’s key national security and foreign policy objectives, and given Iran’s considerable effort from at least the late 1980s to 2003 to develop such weapons,” Blair warned.

Blair repeated in his testimony that U.S.