Shift in Focus?
Washington Post, December 2007
“Tehran’s decision to halt its nuclear weapons program suggests it is less determined to develop nuclear weapons than we have been judging since 2005,” according to one of the key judgments of the new assessment. Two years ago, the intelligence community said publicly that it had “high confidence that Iran was currently determined to have nuclear weapons,” a senior intelligence official said yesterday.
After that assessment was released, the community increased its clandestine and open collection of information about Iran’s program, actions that led to today’s reassessment, the officials said.
The major shift in the intelligence community’s judgment about Iran’s nuclear weapons intentions is contained in unclassified material from a new, classified National Intelligence Estimate sent to Capitol Hill today. The document represents the consensus opinion of the U.S. intelligence community.
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“Since our understanding of Iran’s nuclear capabilities has changed, we felt it was important to release this information to ensure that an accurate presentation is available,” according to a statement from Donald Kerr, principal deputy director of national intelligence.
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According to the document, Iran is considered “highly unlikely” to be technically capable now of producing enough highly enriched weapons grade uranium for a weapon before 2009. With “moderate confidence,” the report puts that date at 2010 and probably not before 2015.
Brings to mind this article by Seymour Hersh, October 2007
The focus of the plans had been a broad bombing attack, with targets including Iran’s known and suspected nuclear facilities and other military and infrastructure sites. Now the emphasis is on “surgical” strikes on Revolutionary Guard Corps facilities in Tehran and elsewhere, which, the Administration claims, have been the source of attacks on Americans in Iraq. What had been presented primarily as a counter-proliferation mission has been reconceived as counterterrorism.
The shift in targeting reflects three developments. First, the President and his senior advisers have concluded that their campaign to convince the American public that Iran poses an imminent nuclear threat has failed (unlike a similar campaign before the Iraq war), and that as a result there is not enough popular support for a major bombing campaign. The second development is that the White House has come to terms, in private, with the general consensus of the American intelligence community that Iran is at least five years away from obtaining a bomb. And, finally, there has been a growing recognition in Washington and throughout the Middle East that Iran is emerging as the geopolitical winner of the war in Iraq.
Irancove @ December 3, 2007