THE USUAL SUSPECTS - AT 8:05 A.M. ET:  Maybe we should stop calling them our "intelligence" services.  The New York Times is reporting that the United States is the odd man out, again, in evaluating intelligence coming from Iran.  No, I don't mean that we're more hawkish, more concerned.  I mean exactly the obvious.  From The New York Times.  Airsickness pills required:

The Israelis, who have delivered veiled threats of a military strike, say they believe that Iran has restarted these “weaponization” efforts, which would mark a final step in building a nuclear weapon. The Germans say they believe that the weapons work was never halted. The French have strongly suggested that independent international inspectors have more information about the weapons work than they have made public.

Meanwhile, in closed-door discussions, American spy agencies have stood firm in their conclusion that while Iran may ultimately want a bomb, the country halted work on weapons design in 2003 and probably has not restarted that effort — a judgment first made public in a 2007 National Intelligence Estimate.

I don't, obviously, have independent information on this.  But for the United States to take the most optimistic point of view, given Iran's continued defiance, and the announcement last week of a secret Iranian nuclear site, seems foolhardy.

Some justify the American hesitation by pointing to what they inevitably call the "catastrophically wrong" intelligence on Iraqi WMDs before the Iraq War.  That's an absurd position that misreads what we actually did find.  Yes, it's true, that we didn't find stockpiles of WMD, but we did indeed find the programs, ready to be restarted once the U.N. sanctions on Iraq were lifted.  They were due to be lifted in 2003.  One can only imagine what Saddam Hussein would have today had we not relieved him of his responsibilities. 

There is this cautionary note from one of America's most distinguished experts on nuclear weapons, on the revealing of the "secret" Iranian nuclear site:

Graham Allison, the author of “Nuclear Terrorism” and a Harvard professor who focuses on proliferation, said he could not conceive of Iran’s building only one such site.

“How likely is it that the Qum facility is all there is? Zero. A prudent manager of a serious program would certainly have a number of sites,” he said.

After all, Mr. Allison said, the lesson Iran took away from Israel’s destruction of an Iraqi reactor more than 25 years ago is to spread facilities around the country.

COMMENT:  The dragging by our intelligence services only plays into the hands of the super-doves around Obama and in Congress.  Meanwhile, some of the Europeans are getting to the right of us on Iran.  What humiliation.

September 29, 2009