Voice(s) of Reason

President Bush said again and again this morning, in that broken-record way he has, that Iran is still a danger and that it might be able to use its knowledge to make weapons secretly. One might assume that's the case. But there's no evidence that is what it's doing. 

Tehran's strategy as described by the NIE would seem to be pretty much as ElBaradei has described it: like it or not, Iran is going to become a "virtual" nuclear weapons state, with the ability to become an active one if it so chooses. "In our judgment," say the authors of the NIE, "only an Iranian political decision to abandon a nuclear weapons objective would plausibly keep Iran from eventually producing nuclear weapons."

To achieve that goal, ElBaradei has suggested that credible international pressure has to be combined with credible international security guarantees to the Iranian regime. The NIE summary doesn't go that far, but it implies much the same thing when it talks about "the linkage many within the [Iranian] leadership probably see between nuclear weapons development and Iran's key national security and foreign policy objectives."

This is all very frustrating, and not only for those, like Vice President Dick Cheney, who fantasize about a world where absolute American power can eliminate every threat. But after the experience in Iraq, I'd rather trust the hedged bets of professional intelligence analysts than the off-base hunches of the ideologues.

For me, the most important line in the report is the one that states in bold-faced lettering, "This NIE does not assume that Iran intends to acquire nuclear weapons." If that's a sign that the Bush administration has moved at last from the assumptions of faith-based warmongering to fact-based policymaking, well, amen to that.

© 2007