It is with some (minor) amusement that I read the NYT article that the IAEA is taking a stronger line on Iran than the new NIE report:
“To be frank, we are more skeptical,” a senior official close to the agency said. “We don‚Äôt buy the American analysis 100 percent. We are not that generous with Iran.”The official called the American assertion that Iran had “halted” its weapons program in 2003 “somewhat surprising.”
Suddenly people are worried. Daddy has gone South on them. Well, maybe that’s a good thing. Time to grow up.
I believe that the “Intelligence Community” is strongly averse to any military action involving Iran. Therefore the NIE was written (and leaked) to ensure that it can NOT be used as a basis for such action. (See WMD’s – Iraq).
If Israel gets nuked as a result, it will be “oops, my bad!”. There has not been any downside to the Intel Community either for being wrong or for having it’s own agenda.
You have to wander how much the flawed Iraq WMD analysis influenced the flawed Iranian WMD analysis.
One was overestimated, this one is underestimated.
I supposed is not fair to judge too harshly agencies in witch the orders of magnitudes of it’s failures could scarcely ever match its successes.
The reason why we need “an intelligence community” it’s because we intelligently predict that it may fail. But the consequences of not having one are so grim we never pause to ponder them.
When, since World War II (if then) has our intelligence community ever been right?
Dick Stanley:
I was a minor member of our intelligence community while serving in the Army Security Agency between 1967 and 1970, stationed in what was then called “West Berlin.” We — that is, those of us engaged in the mission we were involved in, at that place and at that time — were almost always right. That is, we knew with a great deal of precision what the Soviets and the East Germans were doing (with the E. Germans, both militarily and politically), and to the extent we had any influence I think we did quite a bit to keep things as cool as they could be in that part of eastern Europe.
Now tell me: is your question a legitimate one, or are you snarking? If the former, you can find out the answer by doing some not-very-difficult research. If the latter, you probably don’t want an answer.
OT: I wasn’t much taken aback by the Saudi’s representative at Annopolis not wearing the earphones. It was an insult, but I assumed it was all for show, and that the Saudis would definitely be pouring over it in print later, when they were alone.
But this report, if it is true, is very disturbing, not because of the Saudis, but because of the U.S. complicity. I can barely believe it is true. Surely the U.S. would not be be complicit in something this despicable??
Can this be true?