Low confidence in the NIE

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.