On Aug. 9, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that U.S. President Barack Obama has received a new Special National Intelligence Estimate finding that "Iran has made surprising, significant progress toward military nuclear capability." U.S. officials have refused to confirm that the new estimate exists -- either on the record or anonymously -- but the administration has asserted that its overall assessment remains unchanged since its last public statement this January, when James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, said, "Iran is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons ' should it choose to do so. We do not know, however, if Iran will eventually decide to build nuclear weapons." Defense Secretary Leon Panetta reiterated this view on Tuesday, Aug. 14. Unfortunately, the White House's concerted campaign to criminalize national security discourse has prevented officials from discussing the estimate with journalists, allowing the most alarmist conjecture to dominate public debate.
The "new" intelligence is probably old news, but that's hard to see, especially when reporters and officials continue to misstate the judgments of the now famous 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran's nuclear capabilities and intentions. Unless you have carefully read that report, you are almost certainly misinformed about what it says. Much of the discourse, even among foreign-policy "elites," includes wildly inaccurate assertions, which in turn makes the entire discourse about Iran much, much dumber.
This is not the time to dumb down the discussion of Iran's nuclear programs. There is growing support for military action, and we are entering the homestretch of a U.S. presidential election, when sober policy analysis will take a back seat to rhetorical machismo and blatant pandering to any ill-informed prejudice that might swing a few votes. I don't know if time is drawing short, but my friends and colleagues are clearly wondering about the possibility. Injecting a little realism into this discussions depends, first and foremost, on understanding what the intelligence estimates do, and do not, say.
There have been at least four NIEs on Iran's weapon-of-mass-destruction programs: in 2001, 2005, 2007, and 2011. (The 2005 document was a "memo to holders," but for our purposes we can refer to all of them as NIEs.) The defining text is the 2007 NIE. In the popular telling of the story, the 2007 NIE reversed the findings of previous NIEs, revealing that Iran had no nuclear weapons program. This is, depending on your political inclination, a courageous act of dissent by an intelligence community desperate to stop George W. Bush's warmongering administration from invading yet another country, or a cowardly effort by unelected bureaucrats to subvert the will of the people by undermining Bush's determination to prevent the most dangerous weapons from falling into the most dangerous hands. Neither of these caricatures is remotely accurate.
What the 2007 NIE really said is something more cautious and, I would add, interesting. The NIE stated that Iran, until 2003, had a covert nuclear weapons program. The NIE was apparently rather specific about this program, including names, dates, and places. It is also very clear that by "weapons program," it is referring to a parallel effort to the nuclear program run by the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran that centers on the enrichment facility at Natanz. The covert weapons program centered on an entirely different set of activities managed by something called the Physics Research Center (PHRC) located in the Lavizan neighborhood of Tehran and run by a fellow named Mohsen Fakhrizadeh.
In 2003, however, Iran "halted" this latter nuclear weapons program. Now, "halt" is a very special word. Those of us without military experience might think of "halt!" as the sort of command that signals a serious barrier. Like, "Halt, or I will shoot you." The authors of the NIE, on the other hand, were apparently thinking of something else -- a halt in a march, something that may be permanent or temporary. After all, when Iran "halted" this tawdry little enterprise, it isn't as though Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei had Fakhrizadeh and his colleagues put to the sword (though as complete, verifiable, and irreversible disarmament goes, that would be pretty spectacular). The individuals continue to go to work every day, existing as a latent capability to restart a nuclear weapons program. Fakhrizadeh, at last check, is still in charge of these activities. Only the name of his institute has been changed -- from the PHRC to the Organization of Defensive Innovation and Research (Sazeman-e Pazhuhesh va Nowavari-ye Defaie, or SPND). What he does all day is anyone's guess. I like to imagine him playing computer solitaire all day, occasionally glancing at a red phone that never rings.
How could the NIE's authors make such an odd word choice? Why not "pause" or "suspend"? One odd feature of intelligence community products is their distinct lingo, which imbues select words with highly specialized meanings not readily apparent to the rest of the English-speaking world. My favorite example occurs in the 2005 NIE, which said Iran was "determined to develop" nuclear weapons. Determination sounds pretty serious, right? It's a tough word, with plenty of grit and synonymous with "dead set," as John Bolton, former undersecretary of state for arms control, famously described Iran's desire for nuclear weapons. Or not. The drafters of the NIE thought that "determined to develop" conveyed the notion that, though Iran's leaders would like to have a nuclear weapon, they might or might not have a program to develop one. The authors selected "determined to develop" as a softer alternative to saying that Iran was "pursuing" nuclear weapons on the grounds that the latter implied a program we did not know existed. (Still think the intelligence community is a politically savvy entity that routinely interferes in the policy process?)
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