3:45pm
Well, what a relief, eh? According to the US National Intelligence Estimate, Iran isn’t building a nuclear bomb at all! It decided to give up the project of its own volition four years ago!! So we can all stop worrying after all. Iran scare over. Problem solved. World saved. Sure, Iran is continuing to enrich uranium — but that’s presumably just to warm its hands.
Groan. What on earth is wrong with the American intelligence community? Granted that of necessity it can make public only the bare minimum of information, this report provokes a high degree of scepticism. It asserts:
We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program.
But in 2005 this same intelligence community was saying:
"[We] assess with high confidence that Iran currently is determined to develop nuclear weapons despite its international obligations and international pressure, but we do not assess that Iran is immovable."
So are we now to assume that in 2005, Iran was ‘determined to develop nuclear weapons’ despite having ‘halted its nuclear weapon programme’ two years earlier? Were the intelligence community simply wrong in 2005? And if they were that incompetent then, why should we believe what they are saying now?
And look further at what they
are saying now.
We judge with high confidence that the halt lasted at least several years. (Because of intelligence gaps discussed elsewhere in this Estimate, however, DOE and the NIC assess with only moderate confidence that the halt to those activities represents a halt to Iran's entire nuclear weapons program.)...We assess with moderate confidence Tehran had not restarted its nuclear weapons program as of mid-2007, but we do not know whether it currently intends to develop nuclear weapons.
So while in 2005 they had ‘high confidence’ that Iran intended to develop nuclear weapons, now they merely ‘don’t know’. Note also: this bit is not about whether or not Iran is actually developing the things, merely whether it intends to do so. And yet the intelligence community now doesn’t even know that.
The killer is in those two words ‘intelligence gaps’. As the report tells us,
'high confidence’ means that statement is based on high quality information, while ‘moderate confidence’ means the information is credibly sourced and plausible but not of sufficient quality or corroborated sufficiently to warrant a higher level of confidence.
So it follows that their statements that Iran was developing nuclear weapons but then stopped in 2003 were based on reliable information, but they have
less reliable sources for saying that it didn't re-start it.
This does not inspire confidence.
The Israelis, who have every reason for ensuring that their intelligence about Iran is flawless, don’t believe a word of this. As the
International Herald Tribune reports:
Israeli intelligence believes Iran is still trying to develop a nuclear weapon, Israel's defense minister said Tuesday, disputing a U.S. intelligence assessment that Iran has halted its program. ‘It's apparently true that in 2003 Iran stopped pursuing its military nuclear program for a time. But in our opinion, since then it has apparently continued that program,’ Defense Minister Ehud Barak told Army Radio.
Indeed, it may well have been that Iran did stop its nuclear programme, as the Americans assess ‘with high confidence’, because of the international pressure in 2003. Or, indeed, because of the attack on Iraq. But that doesn’t mean they didn’t subsequently start it again.
As the
Weekly Standard points out for the umpteenth time, the US intelligence community has a lousy record in that part of the world. Ever since the war in Iraq, elements within that intelligence community have been throwing disinformation around both to santise retrospectively their own incompetence and to thwart President Bush’s foreign policy approach towards the ‘axis of evil’. This latest NIE smells like another exercise in political gamesmanship. No-one knows whether President Bush intends to strike Iran before he leaves office. What this NIE tells me is that some intelligence folk think (with ‘high confidence’) that he may well do so — and they are determined to stop him.
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11:23am
Last week, I happened to meet America’s former Ambassador to the UN, John Bolton. He was utterly dismayed about Annapolis. President Bush, he said, had torn up everything he believed in. Bolton thought the main reason this had happened was that Bush was simply so determined to get Iraq right that he had left absolutely everything else to Condoleezza Rice and the depredations of the State Department. The result was that at Annapolis, terror had been rewarded, its Israeli victims offered up as sacrificial lambs and the Bush doctrine fed to the flames.
If Bush did allow his attention to wander so dangerously, another spectacular car crash has been Bolton’s successor as UN Ambassador, the much-lionised Zalmay Khalilzad, in the immediate aftermath of Annapolis. In a startling departure from diplomatic protocol, last Thursday Khalilzad tried to present to the Security Council, on the penultimate day of its chairmanship by Indonesia, a US resolution endorsing the Annapolis joint statement — without even showing Israel the text first. No wonder: Israel would have undoubtedly gone ballistic, since such an endorsement would have given teeth to the Annapolis suicide note and involved Israel's mortal enemies in overseeing the ‘peace process’. When this piece of treachery was discovered, the US hastily withdrew its resolution.
It turns out that Khalilzad may have one or two agendas of his own. Last Tuesday, American eyebrows hit the roof when Fox News discovered US Ambassador Khalilzad having lunch with George Soros, the billionaire anti-Bush activist and funder of Moveon.org. As Fox observed, on the surface the two of them would appear to have had little to talk about.
Strange how Soros keeps popping up in this kind of context — he is of course a close associate of Britain’s controversial minister for the UN Lord Malloch Brown, whose peculiar appointment to the British government no-one has yet been able to explain.
As the
New York Sun has gone on to tell us, Khalilzad’s intriguing luncheon companion last week was by no means his only chum with a profoundly anti-western agenda:
A former top U.N. inside operator largely considered a foe by Washington, Pakistan's Iqbal Riza, was the first man Mr. Khalilzad had for lunch as he moved into the official ambassador's residence at the Waldorf-Astoria in April.
Khalizad has also
mentioned his close friendship with former Algerian foreign minister Lakhdar Brahimi . But Brahami has repeatedly expressed his hostility to Israel and has been reported as boasting that he was proud
never to have knowingly shaken the hand of an Israeli or a Jew.
Just like the Saudis at Annapolis – the subject of Ambassador Khalilzad’s attempted UN demarche. Well there's a coincidence.
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1:07pm
Good to see that, in these difficult times, Britain retains a healhy sense of priorities. The Telegraph has reported that stiles and kissing gates may have to be replaced for fear that they are in breach of the 1995 Disability Discrimination Act:
The Act rules that public services should make ‘reasonable adjustments’ to allow disabled access and some councils have interpreted it as meaning that kissing gates - which shut automatically to contain livestock - and stiles obstruct people with disabilities. Suffolk county council is looking at ways to replace the features, which have been part of the British landscape for hundreds of years, with barriers that allow wheelchairs users on paths while keeping livestock secure.
Guy McGregor, the councillor responsible for rights of way, said: ‘We have an obligation to provide access to footpaths for everyone. Many kissing gates are virtually impossible to use if you are in a wheelchair. In consequence there is encouragement that they should not be a methodology to protect land on which farm animals roam. Stiles are also a problem.
Yess!! Obviously thousands of people in wheelchairs, who would otherwise think nothing of bowling along rutted countryside paths studded with tree roots, rocks and boulders, fallen branches, overhanging brambles, mud swamps and other impedimenta to progress which make them such a challenge for the able-bodied, are being stymied by the kissing-gate.
And why stop there? What about dodgem cars? Ice rinks? Bungee jumping? Formation water-skiing? SAS training? How many wheel-chair users can take part in these activities, then, eh?? We should hang our heads in shame.
End rustic disablism now! We need a new methodology of the stile.
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12:41pm
Following my post below, after which he declared he had removed the offensive comments from his website before I wrote about them, Guido Fawkes has made the following contribution to intelligent debate:
Mad Mel and others now talk darkly of anti-semitism. When Guido was kicking Prescott when he was down it was blamed on class snobbery, mocking Melissa Kite was misogyny - so what was Guido guilty of when he was slagging Blair
which has elicited these equally enlightened comments:
stanislav said...
…If it is the case that Blair and Campbell cooked up the dodgy dossier as some sort of quid pro quo for pro-Israeli funders and not just out of greed then this is a whole other kettle of saltfish. I don't know what you've been reading but I haven't read any ‘digs’ about ‘the Jews’ but only people making fairly understandable observations about the proximity of so many of the cast of grotesques to the Friends of Israel, to successive Labour fundraisers being pro-Israeli and to Mr Abrahams being pro-Israeli and to NewLabour, alone amongst European parties, colluding in a genocidal assault on Muslim civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan and, with distinction, in Guantanamo Bay, much to the joy, one can only presume, of the hospital bombers in Tel Aviv and the Friends of Israel on Capitol Hill.
Melanie Alibhai Phillips, of course, would suppress any comment which differed from her own poisonous misanthropy on the grounds that anyone not wedded to her own belligerent, half-witted world view, her odious bullying and her unspeakable stupidity is obviously a Nazi; you sound as though you are of the same stripe. It ain't anti-semitism, stupid, it's anti-criminal. But you know that anyway.
ps I thought all Welshmen were called the same thing, Taffy. It is encouraging to learn they have second names, too, bach. Almost like decent English people.
1:12 AM, December 01, 2007
dalai lama ding dong said...
Agreed Sanilav. spot on as usual. Come back cylopaedes, we miss you.
1:49 AM, December 01, 2007
Meanwhile, I’m glad to see that at least the New Statesman’s
Martin Bright gets it.
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