Voice(s) of Reason

As things stand now, the new NIE says Iran may have the technical ability to produce highly enriched uranium for a bomb by late 2009, "but that is very unlikely." A more plausible timeline would be 2010-2015, according to the estimate, and it's possible that "this capability may not be attained until after 2015"—if, and this is the big if, Iran wants to take that step at all. Tehran says it does not. It says its intentions are entirely peaceful: to make low-enriched nuclear fuel to generate electricity. But as we know, Tehran has lied about its nuclear program in the past. And as the intelligence assessment concludes, Iran now "has the scientific, technical and industrial capacity to produce nuclear weapons if it decides to do so."

That is why four of the five key questions posed to the intelligence community's analysts for this estimate were not about Iran's abilities but about its government's intentions and the factors that might affect its decision-making. On those matters the authors show considerably less confidence than they do about the question of capabilities, and judging from the declassified summary we have seen so far, this NIE may offer less than the headlines likely to be taken from its pages. A great deal remains unknown.

The report, remember, is a consensus opinion of agencies as varied as the National Clandestine Service (the branch of the Central Intelligence Agency that specializes in human intelligence) and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (which operates America's many eyes in the sky). The Department of Energy and the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, as well as the National Security Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency, all have a hand. Getting that many bureaucracies to agree on anything is a minor miracle, getting them to divine the arcane thought processes of Iran's clerical rulers is almost impossible, so it is not surprising that a lot of the language in the report is tentative.

We read, for instance, that "Tehran's decision to halt its nuclear weapons program suggests it is less determined to develop nuclear weapons than we have been judging since 2005. Our assessment that the program probably was halted primarily in response to international pressure suggests Iran may be more vulnerable to influence on the issue than we judged previously."

But look at the timing of the Iranian decision to halt the weapons program in 2003 and the kind of international pressure that existed then. It's not likely to be repeated. In the fall of 2003 the IAEA had just exposed much of the secret nuclear activity Tehran had conducted since the 1980s with the help of A. Q. Khan's clandestine network of atomic bomb makers. (The NIE makes clear that it is talking about a separate weapons program that was affected by the IAEA investigation and was stopped in 2003 but was not part of the same secret programs the IAEA uncovered. Diplomatic sources in Vienna, where the IAEA is based, say privately that this is news to them.)

So in 2003 Iran had just been caught in "material breach" of its obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and might have faced severe sanctions. Washington, meanwhile, had invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, both of which are on Iran's border, and at the time it wasn't clear how painfully incompetent the Bush administration would prove as an occupying power. It's also important that in 2003 the Iranian government was run by the relatively moderate and reasonable President Mohammad Khatami. Since 2005 the man in charge is the semimystical Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose rhetoric has been, to say the least, inflammatory. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei remains a constant. He has the last word now, as he did then—but what is it? We don't really know, and the NIE summary doesn't tell us.