Very odd development.
Given their cost, why would Iran engage in nuclear energy projects given the energy resources it has?
I don't know what to make of this NIE. Perhaps it is more accurate than the one on Iraq's WMD:
gwu.edu
There is a pattern, though, if [admittedly, a big if] this latest NIE is accurate: neither Iraq nor Iran actually have had a nuclear weapons program in place at the time they have been studied [Iraq of course did have one before Saddam invaded Kuwait].
Is bluffing on this scale part of the ME landscape?
And what about the Syrian event? Is that going to be simply ignored?
There are wheels within wheels on this latest development; I can't even begin to guess where they lie or how they turn. I say this because it was as late as a couple of years ago that an NIE was issued which suggested, with a high degree of confidence that Iran was hell-bent on developing nukes. Today's NIE uses the same 'high degree of confidence' language as the 2005 NIE but to reach an utterly different conclusion.
news.bbc.co.uk
Funny how 'high degrees of confidence' can change so radically on the same subject over the course of a mere two years.
Who knows, perhaps new facts came to light. Nonetheless, my point is that NIE's expressed in terms of 'high degree[s] of confidence' aren't worth the paper they're written on. There has been simply to many errors and volte faces within short time frames to make them credible. Their contradictory findings call all of their conclusions into question.
I smell politics, not intelligence gathering and assessment, at play. Unfortunately, there is no way for us, the great unwashed, to make any kind of reasonable assessment of the merits of any of these NIE's. The process and the history, however, are not too well hidden. Sometimes they are more meaningful than the substance, e.g., the newly released NIE was completed about a year ago, less than a year after the 2005 NIE was itself completed, indicating tht the intelligence agencies changed their minds in a year, more or less. I'll let you reach your own conclusions aboutthat.
The morons on the left will no doubt start harping about the Administration posturing and saber-rattling for a year after it became aware of the NIE released today. Given the abrupt and relatively sudden change of positions, they can hardly be blamed. And besides, since when is saber-rattling and posturing not part of the international discourse, not a way to make a strong point? |
