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COMMENTARY
December 4, 2007
Undermisestimating
According to a declassified, and indeed ambitiously publicized report -- launched by Stephen Hadley, the national security adviser, from a White House press conference, Monday -- the U.S. now thinks Iran's ayatollahs gave up their nuclear weapons programme sometime in 2003. At least, that is the conclusion of the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran, which melds reports from sixteen U.S. intelligence agencies. This is big news, whether or not the findings are true.Big news in the mainstream media, where it has long been averred that U.S. and other intelligence estimates of Saddam Hussein's holdings in weapons of mass destruction, prior to the American invasion of 2003, were nonsense. “Everyone knows” these findings were made to justify President Bush's war in Iraq (especially the French ones, I insert sarcastically), and that they should have been greeted with more scepticism when they were announced. This leaves two options in responding to the latest findings on Iran, for journalists holding fixed points of view. The first is to assume that no mortal enemy of the U.S. ever has any WMD, and therefore the Yankee spies are right at last, on the stopped-clock principle. The other is to assume that U.S. intelligence estimates are always wrong, in which case, we had all better duck. I guessed right, though at the speed this event unfolded, my reader will never be able to check my claim. I guessed Mr Hadley's announcement would go right to the top of the news, and be greeted with even less scepticism than Colin Powell's presentation on Iraq to the Security Council five years ago. My reader will guess that my own inclination is towards the latter option, however. Everything I have learned, during my journalistic immersion in the War on Whatever since 9/11/01, persuades me that U.S. intelligence agencies should be ignored. Part of this I learned the hard way, in the preparatory stages of the Iraq war, when I myself was privileged with numerous intelligence “leaks,” and access to fairly senior people. Again and again I found that, alike on large matters and small, their predictions were worthless, and that I would have done better following my nose. I have given the reasons why, passim, through columns over the years. The chief one is simple. There is no evidence that any U.S. intelligence agency has, or has ever had, human agents within Revolutionary Iran, old Baathist Iraq, the Al Qaeda networks, Hamas -- even Saudi Arabia. And by no other means can important and timely information be obtained. The materials that are instead gathered are a welter of statistics, satellite photos, communications intercepts, traveller's tales, the musings of academic “experts,” and at best the odd debriefing of a defector -- processed by arcane, often cybernetic processes, and ultimately interpreted by an intelligence establishment that seems determined to exhibit everything wrong with a post-modern Ivy League education, and the “gliberal” attitudes inculcated therein. We have, not only in the U.S. today but throughout the West, with the occasional exception of Israel, spy agencies without spies. And this in itself is a problem neither their governments nor the spy agencies themselves seem capable of tackling. Fortunately for us, the lesson of history is that intelligence has seldom if ever played a significant part in determining the final outcome of a military confrontation. (See John Keegan's book, Intelligence in War: Knowledge of the Enemy from Napoleon to Al Qaeda; 2003.) The U.S. intelligence agencies appear to be alone in their current Iran assessment, except for Russia, which has long maintained Iran's intentions are peaceful, while earning huge sums building much of the nuclear infrastructure in question. Israel, for instance, is scratching her collective head, and the current Israeli defence minister, Ehud Barak -- not a warmonger, but the Labour party man who as prime minister tried to give east Jerusalem away at Camp David but failed -- said this to Israeli Army Radio: “It's apparently true that in 2003 Iran stopped pursuing its military nuclear program for a time. But in our opinion, since then it has apparently continued that program.” We do not know the sources for the revelation about 2003: that part is naturally classified. I speculate that the Iranians went to some trouble to document such a transient decision, made in a moment when the U.S. and allies appeared more threatening than they do now, and then fed the material to the West through multiple, and therefore mutually confirming, channels. I, for what my judgement is worth, think it so obvious that a regime of Iran's nature, and with Iran's means, and Iran's connexions, is pursuing nuclear weapons, that I will hardly be persuaded to the contrary, even by an entire football stadium full of Stephen Hadleys. Instead, I am inclined to a darker conclusion. The Bush administration has decided to back down from its confrontation with Iran, and has advanced this report for rhetorical cover. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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