The National Intelligence Estimate on Iran's nukes has been in the works for months. So why did it get released now? Various commentators are guessing that hardening opposition had "caused Cheney and his team to fold their cards," or that a Democratic-controlled Congress pushed the Director of National Intelligence, or that the spooks are trying to undermine Bush. The latter two, respectively, appear to be untrue and ridiculous, and Cheney’s team folding its cards sounds unlikely in the extreme.
Another possibility exists, though: the Bush administration may have wanted to salvage negotiations with Iran after the "disaster" this weekend in London. This story has been largely lost in the NIE furor, but the new Iranian nuclear negotiator, Saeed Jalili, told diplomats that all proposals made in previous negotiations over the nuclear issue were irrelevant – that the diplomatic efforts to date were for naught. This led to intimations that the negotiations would shut down, with one official quoted saying “we can’t do business with these guys at this point.”
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Since the NIE says very explicitly that international pressure was instrumental in causing a halt in Tehran’s nuclear weapons research, the Bush administration may have hoped releasing the report would shore up support for continued diplomacy. Downsides to releasing the report would have applied whenever it came out; doing so this weekend at least offered one potential benefit in addition to all the problems. And the spin coming from Bush supports this theory. In his press conference Tuesday, he said "to me, the
NIE…provides an opportunity for us to rally the international community—to continue to rally the community—to pressure the Iranian regime to suspend its program."
As with any classified assessment, we have to be careful to assume too much from the public release of the NIE. The report was notably silent on how far Iran had gone in its weapons research program – the
2010-2015 timetable given was only for the Iranians to produce enough *material *for a bomb. Also, Israeli officials are “unconvinced” that the program is currently frozen. This is worrisome, given that while the NIE has “high confidence” that Iran’s nuclear program stopped in 2003, it only claims “medium confidence” that the program did not restart. For now we can only hope that it didn’t and – since we have been told with striking clarity that Iran is susceptible – continue to apply diplomatic pressure.
-- Eric Hundman
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