Yes, Let's Have A New Iran N.I.E.

By Steve Hynd

The Wall Street Journal, which has been leading the charge for a new National Intelligence Estimate on Iran since about an hour after the last one's conclusions were released in 2007, reports that a new N.I.E. might be in the offing.

The 2007 report created a political headache for the Bush administration when Republicans and some allied governments such as Israel criticized the broad public conclusion that Iran was backing off its nuclear ambitions.

The report reversed earlier findings that Iran was pursuing a nuclear-weapons program. It found with "high confidence" that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003, and with "moderate confidence" that it hadn't been restarted as of mid-2007.

So far, intelligence officials are not "ready to declare that invalid," a senior U.S. intelligence official said, emphasizing that the judgment covered the 2003-2007 time frame only. That leaves room for a reassessment of the period since the December 2007 report was completed, the official suggested.

The spy agencies "have a lot more information since we last did" a national intelligence estimate, the official said. Some of it "tracks precisely with what we've seen before," while other information "causes us to reassess what we've seen before," the official added.

The report by Siobhan Gorman and Jay Solomon is entirely sourced to "current and former U.S. intelligence officials say". No names, no pack drill. But it does include the widespread untruth, easily fact-checked, that German intelligence thinks Iran has a current nuclear weapons program, so that might give a hint to a slant in the reporting.

A shift in the U.S. intelligence community's official stance -- concluding Iran restarted its nuclear weapons work or that Iran's ambitions have ramped up -- could significantly affect President Barack Obama's efforts to use diplomacy to contain Tehran's capabilities.

And if a new N.I.E. concludes that Iran still hasn't restarted any weapons program - in the only important sense, that of proceeding to highly enrich fuel, shape it into warheads and mount it on missiles - will that shut the Iran hawks, both neocon and Clintonista, up? Of course not. Because, they'll say, it could restart at any time...and anyway, the conclusions were politicized!

Still, I'd welcome a new N.I.E. just for the spanner it will throw in the "bomb Iran" works even if those who have long yelled for one, including the WSJ, are most interested in the potential for inflicting political damage on Obama it might give. Because there will be no proof of an actual weapons program - it's been obvious for a goodly while now that Iran seems most interested in a "virtual" deterrent capacity, doing all the work short of breakout but never stepping over the line into actual warhead production.

Still, any new N.I.E. should at the very least include a clear-eyed assessment of the Laptop of Death documents and the way in which the Bush administration set up the IAEA's Olli Heinonen to give a briefing based upon those documents just so that George Schulte could then leak the briefing to the press. That should be fun.

While we're at it, lets also have that N.I.E. address other non-nuclear scary stories about Iran - in particular the persistent but false one that improvised armor-piercing bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan must be coming from Iran under Iranian government direction.