And since then, our intelligence community hasn't noticed anything to indicated the Iranians restarted their suspended nuclear programs. Again, I have no doubt our intelligence community has not seen anything. That isn't exactly the same as saying Iran hasn't restarted their nuclear weapons programs.
But I'm a realist. In the classic sense, of course, not one frozen in the amber of the Cold War. Realism today requires different policies than realism required in the Cold War. Realism left me and not the other way around.
The reality of the situation is that the NIE has constrained President Bush in dealing with Iran while Iran has no atomic weapons. And I say this in full knowledge that the popular notion of the NIE starts and stops with the statement that Iran halted its nuclear weapons programs in 2003 and hasn't started them again. Our press has failed us again. Report after report says that Iran is not a threat based on this NIE.
Pam Hess is a notable exception. She reports on all the aspects of the NIE report summary. I recommend it. Better, read the NIE report summary itself. You only need to read the two plus pages of the key judgments. Don't rely on our press. They've failed us yet again. They had to read but 2-1/5 pages of key judgments, yet only Pam Hess seems to have done this and actually reported on the judgments.
But I'm a realist. As much as I've hoped for several years that we'd ovethrow the Iranian government or destroy the Iranian nuclear facilities to buy time as a fall back position, my deep worry the last two years was that we were preparing to cope with a nuclear Iran.
And so we will try to do just that. And if Iran under the mullahs was normal, we'd have quite impressive reasons to think we will be successful. We have troops on Iran's borders and a fleet off their coast. We will have anti-missile defenses just in case and an alliance of Persian Gulf Arab states to contain Iran.
So we will gather our forces around Iran and hope that like North Korea, we can contain the mullahs. And we will watch for unmistakable signs Iran is nuclear. Because even though the NIE admits that Iran had nuclear weapons programs from 1988 to 2003 (inconveniently before our invasion of Iraq), Iran denies their nuclear programs are anything but peaceful. So only a picture of Ahmadinejad personally signing the bomb meant for Tel Aviv will weaken the resolve of our Left to be irresolute.
And while we watch Iran, we will hope that Iranians will overthrow the regime before we must face the gathering threat. We may even try to spark such a revolt. But our heart won't be in it. We will be in a defensive mind set and will fear the effects of supporting a revolt within an accepted enemy just as we watched Hungarians revolt in 1956 and Shia Iraqis revolt in 1991.
Of course, such a plan dooms 70 million Iranians to live under the mullahs' sick rule. But no matter, we have bigger worries like carbon footprints to focus on.
Iran will get nuclear weapons eventually. The only question is when. The NIE even supports this wild claim of mine:
We assess with moderate confidence that convincing the Iranian leadership to forgo the eventual development of nuclear weapons will be difficult given the linkage many within the leadership probably see between nuclear weapons development 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. In our judgment, only an Iranian political decision to abandon a nuclear weapons objective would plausibly keep Iran from eventually producing nuclear weapons—and such a decision is inherently reversible.
But the NIE and the failure of almost all of our press to report on anything but that 2003 halt means we will not have the political will to attack Iran before Iran admits to having a nuclear weapon. At which point our Left will say we are deterred and Iran would never use them. Heck, they'll claim Iran wouldn't have them but for our unjust paranoia. And then at some point there will be a nuclear war and tens of millions will die horrible deaths. But hey, maybe a small nuclear winter negates global warming!
This somewhat comforting scenario ignores only one small point--Israel does not accept the press interpretation of our NIE:
Defense Minister Ehud Barak directly challenged the new assessment in an interview with Israel's Army Radio, and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said the new finding wouldn't deter Israel or the United States from pressing its campaign to stop Iran from developing a nuclear weapons capability.
"It seems Iran in 2003 halted for a certain period of time its military nuclear program, but as far as we know, it has probably since revived it," Barak said.
"Even after this report, the American stance will still focus on preventing Iran from attaining nuclear capability," Olmert said. "We will expend every effort along with our friends in the U.S. to prevent the Iranians from developing nuclear weapons."
So even though Israel cannot now do the job as thoroughly as we could, Israel will likely not look away when reasonable people can no longer doubt what Iran's mullahs are up to. Israel will attack Iran.
Yet not all is lost if the future unfolds this way. Israel did strike Syria's nuclear facilities (whatever they were) in September without Iran--Syria's master--taking any action in response. And we appear to have assisted Israel in this mission.
So perhaps behind the shield we are building to contain Iran, with our help Israel will develop the conventional means they currently lack to strike hard at Iran's nuclear facilities and mullah leadership. Perhaps we will help Israel with technical assistance and refueling during the actual strike. Maybe Israel will succeed without recourse to nuclear weapons.
And then we will use our shield to blunt any Iranian response to that strike.
Or maybe there is no happy ending to an American collective decision that Iran cannot possibly be developing nuclear weapons. Perhaps George Bush was the last president who could have stopped Iran while the price was relatively low. Perhaps the Gates of Hell will open and it will be too late to do anything about the reality of a nuclear war that has always been out there.
Hey, I'm just being realistic.
Have a nice day.
UPDATE: Robert Kagan agrees that reality requires us to accept that our military leverage has all but evaporated:
Regardless of what one thinks about the National Intelligence Estimate's conclusion that Iran stopped its nuclear weapons program in 2003 -- and there is much to question in the report -- its practical effects are indisputable. The Bush administration cannot take military action against Iran during its remaining time in office, or credibly threaten to do so, unless it is in response to an extremely provocative Iranian action. A military strike against suspected Iranian nuclear facilities was always fraught with risk. For the Bush administration, that option is gone.
Neither, however, will the administration make further progress in winning international support for tighter sanctions on Iran. Fear of American military action was always the primary reason Europeans pressured Tehran. Fear of an imminent Iranian bomb was secondary. Bringing Europeans together in support of serious sanctions was difficult before the NIE. Now it is impossible.
With its policy tools broken, the Bush administration can sit around isolated for the next year. Or it can seize the initiative, and do the next administration a favor, by opening direct talks with Tehran.
I part company on the talks on their nuclear program. Let the Europeans continue them for whatever they're worth. We should remain the "bad cop" in the good cop/bad cop routine. If we join the conference-fest, who else is left to scare Iran's mullahs?
Still, maybe there are grounds for talks under certain condition. If we can't bomb Iran's nuclear facilities and the mullahs won't cooperate to fully dismantle their programs rather than suspend them for whatever reason they are suspended, maybe regime change is the only hope. Strategypage sees problems inside Iran:
November 24, 2007: The thousands of Iranians crossing the Iraqi border each day to visit Shia religious shrines, are becoming a political problem. These pilgrims return with stories of how prosperous the Iraqis are in a democracy. In Iran, the Sunni Arab terrorism is played up, but the pilgrims rarely see any evidence of that. They do see freedom and prosperity, especially in contrast to what they have back home. Iran cannot stop these visits, which were allowed even under Saddam Hussein (who encouraged them during the 1990s, as a source of revenue for his embargoed rule).
November 23, 2007: President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has come under increasing criticism from the religious leadership, which actually outranks him and controls more actual government power. Ahmadinejad's stature has taken a beating in opinion polls, as many Iranians wonder when they are going to see some benefit from all that oil revenue.
Perhaps contained by our military, alliances, and missile defenses, Iran will be vulnerable to regime change yet. Perhaps if we insist on protections for dissidents inside Iran and protections for freedom of the press (including online bloggers) as the price for talking to Iran about their nukes, we can set the stage for finally solving this problem.
The problem has always been the regime, stupid. Striking Iran was always my fallback position as an alternative to allowing Iran to go nuclear. Maybe this NIE compels us to actually seek regime change.
