I missed Eli Lake's piece in the Sun yesterday on the NIE, but this poked its nose out from beneath the sod:
Two former American intelligence officials and a current official told The New York Sun that the estimate had changed significantly in the last month before its release.
"I know for a fact that most of the judgments were all hedges basically as of two months ago," a former official said.
"Former American intelligence officials" is usually a phrase preceding some dire pronouncement on how corrupt, tendentious and groupthink-afflicted the White House is when it says something 180-degrees from what the NIE did. So who knows. As Dan said, had the report been no better than a syncopated "drum beat" to war with Iran, everyone now praising its methodological rigor would be claiming, "Well, what'd you expect from this administration?"
Let's put it this way: The 2005 NIE determined that Iran couldn't have nukes before 2015. If we're to use this as the worst-case scenario contrast with the 2007 NIE, then we still have enough time to:
1. Wait for future NIEs to confirm or disconfirm what this latest one has yielded;
2. See if Iran cooperates fully with the IAEA, or whether it continues to withhold vital information as to the status of its program and the regime's intentions going forward;
3. See if Iraq — which has complicated ties with the Islamic Republic — can't perhaps serve as the ablest mediator in the dispute, especially in light of the fact that Iran's longstanding reason for developing nuclear weapons was to deter further aggression from Saddam Hussein, now a non-possibility.
All of this, I might add, could be rendered moot by one eventuality: Israel takes it upon itself to wage a preemptive strike against Iran's nuclear facilities, one of which is located quite close to Tehran and would result in high casualties if undertaken when a reactor there is live. I recently attended a discussion given by a high-ranking former Israeli military official who told me that the only check on this happening sooner or later was that the U.S. will do it first. The point of no return for Israel, the official said, is not even a completed Iranian weapons program — he was confident the IDF could neutralize Iran's capability after they'd already got it.
We should be prepared for Osirak redux, in other words, and the political and military nightmare its entrains.