State Department Skeptic: Be Careful About Iran

I've been having an interesting e-mail exchange with a State Department official who's familiar with how Foggy Bottom has been thinking about Iran and its nukes. Here's one of the notes:

Offices aren't always of one mind, but I would say that the general opinion about Iran's nuclear weapons program... was that it was still alive, but only just. Rationales for this view varied some, but there were two main groups:

a) Iran is building up its latent technical capabilities so it can sprint (1-2 years) to a nuke if it needs to. (more common)

b)
Iran is doing as much as it thinks it can get away with under the watchful eye of the IAEA. Efforts can be scaled back up if the world loses interest. (less common)

I tend to agree with the folks in the A group. The Iranians are playing a shrewd game of chess -- doing enough to get what they want (eventually) while keeping political costs low. We can't do much to stop them because immediacy is the only thing that commands attention nowadays. I bet they have waiting for us to publicly overreach ourselves -- and that day may have been today.

Also, I'm a skeptic and there wasn't enough intel to convince me.

But hey, like all good civil servants, they wanted to support U.S. policy.
That required suspending a certain amount of disbelief to get the job done. I don't blame them.

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