'Iran NIE: Non-Nuclear Fallout Washington Dispatch: The response to the intelligence community's recent assessment troubled policy wonks on both sides of the Iran debate, all of whom agree that a threat remains.
By Laura Rozen
December 18, 2007
By Laura Rozen
December 18, 2007
The immediate conventional wisdom spurred by the recent National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran was that its conclusions were good news for those favoring a diplomatic track with Tehran—and a devastating rebuke to those who desire military action. Hawks predictably cried foul over the intelligence community's assessment that Tehran halted a secret nuclear weapons program in the fall of 2003 and is susceptible to international diplomatic pressure, and quickly sought to discredit the intelligence analysts who produced the 150-page document, only a short summary of which was unclassified and released (PDF). But as the dust settled, some foreign-policy wonks looking to put the brakes on the bomb-Iran crowd have become concerned about the NIE's possible consequences. They say that just because the regime stopped its weapons program doesn't mean the threat posed by a nuclear Iran should be underestimated. And they worry that the NIE may make it harder to rally international support to pressure Tehran, and, thereby, paradoxically, may make future military action more and not less likely.
"The more I digest everything…the more and more I begin to fear that the manner in which this NIE was written and released to the public is a disaster and a serious setback to an intelligent U.S. policy," says a Democratic Hill staffer who works on Iran proliferation. "Our best hope for derailing the Iranian nuclear program and stop[ping] short of military action was for a concerted international campaign of diplomatic and economic sanctions coordinated at the U.N. Security Council. With the release of this NIE, and the inevitable distortions and simplifications echoing in press coverage, a third [Security Council] resolution is dead." Further, he continued, it will now be harder to convince international financial institutions to boycott Iran, as the U.S. government has been trying to do for some time.
While the NIE stated that Iran had halted a secret nuclear weapons program, the remaining issue is Tehran's efforts to produce highly enriched uranium in defiance of a U.N. ban. Iran says its nuclear program is for civilian purposes, but experts say that after enough highly enriched uranium is produced it can be weaponized without great technical difficulty.'
"The more I digest everything…the more and more I begin to fear that the manner in which this NIE was written and released to the public is a disaster and a serious setback to an intelligent U.S. policy," says a Democratic Hill staffer who works on Iran proliferation. "Our best hope for derailing the Iranian nuclear program and stop[ping] short of military action was for a concerted international campaign of diplomatic and economic sanctions coordinated at the U.N. Security Council. With the release of this NIE, and the inevitable distortions and simplifications echoing in press coverage, a third [Security Council] resolution is dead." Further, he continued, it will now be harder to convince international financial institutions to boycott Iran, as the U.S. government has been trying to do for some time.
While the NIE stated that Iran had halted a secret nuclear weapons program, the remaining issue is Tehran's efforts to produce highly enriched uranium in defiance of a U.N. ban. Iran says its nuclear program is for civilian purposes, but experts say that after enough highly enriched uranium is produced it can be weaponized without great technical difficulty.'
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