Voice(s) of Reason

It's tough when you've been a president with a faith-based foreign policy and the facts get in the way. That much was clear as President George W. Bush tried this morning to explain a fundamental change in his government's evaluation of Iran's nuclear ambitions. "Without getting into sources and methods," he said with what may have been self-conscious irony, "our intelligence community has made a great discovery." The bottom line: Iran had a covert nuclear weapons program, as administration officials have long suspected, but that same program was stopped in the fall of 2003. While Bush was raising the specter of World War III with Iran a few weeks ago, his spies were checking and rechecking the information they had that made such statements look, well, apocalyptically overblown.

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In fact, the intelligence community has acted this time around as it should have done before the invasion of Iraq, making its estimates on the basis of the best information at hand, not the best information the administration wanted to hear. We should thank God and perhaps Robert Gates, the old CIA hand who's now secretary of defense. We should thank all the rational minds in the 16 various agencies whose just-issued National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) reached these conclusions. And we should be glad they've pretty well humiliated the chicken hawks in the Bush administration—those few, that is, who haven't flown the coop or been fired.

Two years ago, when those guys were still in charge, the previous NIE expressed "high confidence that Iran currently is determined to develop nuclear weapons." How did they know that? Apparently they didn't. But that's what they assumed, and that assumption has been driving a lot of the bellicose talk in Washington ever since.

We should also thank the Nobel Peace Prize–winning International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and its director general, Mohamed ElBaradei, who has been vilified by the right wing in Israel and the United States with a rancor that borders on hysteria. This so-called "rogue regulator" and "cat's paw for Iran" has been, in fact, just about the only public voice of reason authoritative enough to resist the agitprop coming out of Tel Aviv, Washington and, more recently, Paris. ElBaradei clearly deserves an apology from the neocons that he has taken to calling, undiplomatically but accurately, the "new crazies."

Note that I do not say Iran deserves an apology.

In fact, the mullahs in Tehran have grown increasingly provocative, dismissing the demands of the United Nations Security Council that they suspend current uranium enrichment activities, which could produce the stuff from which nuclear weapons are made. They have helped create a crisis atmosphere, and that is likely to continue even if the risks of war are diminished. They can be expected to act as if they were innocent all along and have now been exonerated. But that isn't quite the case.