The who-knew-what-when questions and the larger story
By Paul Woodward, War in Context, December 4, 2007

According to President Bush, “it wasn’t until last week that I was briefed on the NIE that is now public.” National Security Adviser, Stephen Hadley, was yesterday even more specific: “…the intelligence community finally came to the judgments that they came to on this issue Tuesday of last week. The President was briefed on Wednesday.” Was that before or after Israel’s foreign delegation in Washington had been briefed?

Haaretz today reports that the findings of the National Intelligence Estimate, “did not catch the Israeli leadership by surprise. During their visit to Washington last week, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and Defense Minister Ehud Barak were briefed on the report.” The Israelis arrived on Sunday and left on Wednesday evening.

So, given that the subtext for the Annapolis Conference was the configuration of an alliance aimed at containing Iran, are we to believe that just before Olmert left Washington (and just after Bush had been briefed), the Israeli prime minister was pulled aside by administration officials who said, “Oh, by the way, we’d like to share our latest intelligence findings on Iran’s nuclear weapons program – or lack thereof. We think you’ll find them interesting.” I suspect that didn’t happen. When Hadley says Bush was briefed on Wednesday, he’s probably being economical with the truth and might under cross-examination concede that “briefed” merely means being shown the final draft of a text with which Bush was already familiar. I’ll leave it to bloggers more tenacious than me to get to the bottom of this. It’s not that these aren’t interesting questions, but they risk generating more heat than light.

The hyperfocus on a major news day in Washington has the unfortunate effect of reinforcing the kinds of perception that were summed up today in the New York Times by the line, “Rarely, if ever, has a single intelligence report so completely, so suddenly, and so surprisingly altered a foreign policy debate here.”

There has actually been a build up to this watershed event, but because the build up didn’t fit the conventional wisdom, it has largely been unnoticed. The conventional wisdom has been that the administration — until yesterday — was on a fairly steady trajectory in the direction of a military confrontation with Iran. But over the last few months there have been a number of signs that inside the administration, the proponents of military action had in fact already lost the argument.

The resurgence of diplomacy has been quietly driven by Defense Secretary Robert Gates. Gates’ low-profile approach has meant that his efforts have frequently escaped the attention of the media. Even so, to be neither the focus of cable news nor blogosphere banter, is not to be politically ineffective. The pivotal role Gates has played in shifting the administration’s approach is described in Newsweek:

Late this summer, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates traveled to the Middle East, to Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. At each stop, high-ranking Arab officials anxiously asked him: was the United States preparing to attack Iran? Gates reassured them all that the United States had no plans to do so, at least any time soon. He wasn’t dramatic about it, says a Defense Department official who accompanied Gates on the trip but declined to be identified discussing secret talks. “He didn’t grab anyone’s arm and say, ‘I’ve got Cheney under control, wink, wink’,” says this official. But Gates was low-key, straightforward, steadying—calming, even soothing in a dry and matter-of-fact way. A little later, at the end of September, Gates met with the Democratic Senate Policy Committee (something his predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld, would never do). One of the senators nervously asked if the Bush administration was looking for a reason to bomb Tehran. “It would be a strategic calamity to attack Iran at this time,” Gates replied. Sen. Evan Bayh, who was at the meeting, told Newsweek: “You could almost feel the relief around the table. It was, ‘Well, I guess he’s not here just to repeat the party line.’ It was just such a breath of fresh air from Rumsfeld and the ‘my way or the highway’ attitude of others.”

While among Bush critics it has often been assumed that the so-called reality-based community only exists outside the administration, it seems clear that Gates belongs to this community and that while Bush and Cheney are unlikely to admit as much, it is under Gates’ tutelage that they are now willing to give diplomacy a chance. Cheney might remain a skeptic but the ball — at least for now — is out of his hands.

The time is now ripe for an initiative. Bush alluded to such a possibility today when he said, “There has been a moment during my presidency in which diplomacy provided a way forward for the Iranians. And our hope is we can get back on that path again.” He was harking back to 2003 but engaging in a bit of revisionism by neglecting to mention that it was he and the vice president who then refused to receive the diplomatic ball when it was being tossed in their direction by Iran. Is it now possible — even with Khatami partially out of the picture — that the administration is hinting that it might be open to another grand bargain?

Israel unconvinced Iran has dropped nuclear program
By Steven Erlanger and Graham Bowley, New York Times, December 4, 2007

Israel today took a darker view of Iran’s nuclear ambitions than the assessment released by United States intelligence agencies yesterday, saying it was convinced that Iran was pursuing nuclear weapons.

It said Iran had probably resumed the nuclear weapons program the American report said was stopped in the fall of 2003. “It is apparently true that in 2003 Iran stopped pursuing its military nuclear program for a certain period of time,” Defense Minister Ehud Barak told Israeli Army Radio. “But in our estimation, since then it is apparently continuing with its program to produce a nuclear weapon.” [complete article]

A blow to Bush’s Tehran policy
By Peter Baker and Robin Wright, Washington Post, December 4, 2007

President Bush got the world’s attention this fall when he warned that a nuclear-armed Iran might lead to World War III. But his stark warning came at least a month or two after he had first been told about fresh indications that Iran had actually halted its nuclear weapons program.

The new intelligence report released yesterday not only undercut the administration’s alarming rhetoric over Iran’s nuclear ambitions but could also throttle Bush’s effort to ratchet up international sanctions and take off the table the possibility of preemptive military action before the end of his presidency.

Iran had been shaping up as perhaps the dominant foreign policy issue of Bush’s remaining year in office and of the presidential campaign to succeed him. Now leaders at home and abroad will have to rethink what they thought they knew about Tehran’s intentions and capabilities. [complete article]

U.S. spies concoct a potent Iran brew
By Kaveh L Afrasiabi, Asia Times, December 5, 2007

The timing of the report’s release is curious, coinciding both with Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad’s crucial meeting with the heads of states of the Gulf Cooperation Council, where Ahmadinejad has made substantial progress in confidence-building by advancing the idea of security and economic cooperation in the region, and with critical discussions with the so-called “Five plus One” countries regarding the next United Nations steps against Iran. The Five plus One includes the five permanent members of the UN security Council – United States, the United Kingdom, France, Russia and China – plus Germany.

Irrespective of Hadley’s comments, the new NIE actually undermines much of the rationale behind the US-led push for a third round of US sanctions on Iran, by flatly contradicting what until now has been held as an article of faith by US politicians and much of the media. That is, the notion that Iran has been pursuing an open weapons program via its uranium-enrichment and reprocessing activities. [complete article]

‘Bomb, bomb, bomb; bomb, bomb, Iran’
By Michael Dobbs, Washington Post, December 4, 2007

There has been a lot of loose talk about Iran’s nuclear capabilities out on the campaign trail. Here is a sampling of campaign rhetoric undercut by the publication of the latest National Intelligence Estimate on Iran, representing the consensus view of the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies. [complete article]

Candidates hold to their stances on Iran
By Marc Santora, New York Times, December , 2007

The campaigns of the leading Democratic candidates seized Monday on an intelligence report showing that Iran had halted its development of nuclear weapons, saying the findings justified their more cautious approach to Tehran.

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s national security director, Lee Feinstein, said the report’s findings “expose the latest effort by the Bush administration to distort intelligence to pursue its ideological ends.” He added that the report “vindicates” Mrs. Clinton’s approach, which he described as “vigorous American-led diplomacy, close international cooperation and effective economic pressure, with the prospect of carefully calibrated incentives if Iran addresses our concerns.”

In fact, in September Mrs. Clinton, Democrat of New York, voted in favor of a Senate measure declaring the Iranian Revolutionary Guards “proliferators of mass destruction,” a vote that was condemned by her rivals in the Democratic field. After the vote, her aides issued a statement saying, “The Revolutionary Guards are deeply involved in Iran’s nuclear program.” [complete article]

How did a 2005 estimate on Iran go awry?
By William J. Broad and David E. Sanger, New York Times, December 4, 2007

In the summer of 2005, senior American intelligence officials began traveling the world with a secret slide show drawn from thousands of pages that they said were downloaded from a stolen Iranian laptop computer, trying to prove that Iran was lying when it said it had no interest in building a nuclear weapon.

The slides detailed efforts to build what looked like a compact warhead for an Iranian missile and were portrayed by the Americans as suggesting that the Iranian military was working to solve the technical problems in building a bomb.

Now, that assertion has been thrown into doubt by a surprising reversal: the conclusion, contained in the declassified summary of a new National Intelligence Estimate on Iran’s nuclear programs, that Iran’s effort to master the technology of building a nuclear weapon had halted two years before those briefings. [complete article]