The National Intelligence Estimate recently reported that “Iran stopped its nuclear weapons program in 2003,” further exacerbating the ongoing dispute between Democrats and Republicans about Iranian intentions and the best way to deal with them. 

While “Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid says the report vindicates Democrats who have been skeptical of claims that Iran was seeking nuclear weapons,” the ranking Republican member of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Pete Hoekstra … says he is ‘not convinced’ of their conclusion that Iran stopped its nuclear weapons program in late 2003.” (Newsmax.com, December 6, 2007)

 

Political wrangling aside, a recent Rasmussen Reports survey found the following:

• “Just 18 percent of American voters believe that Iran has halted its nuclear weapons program.”

• “… 66 percent disagree (with the NIE) and say Iran has not stopped its nuclear weapons program.”

• “…67 percent of American voters believe that Iran remains a threat to the national security of the United States. ...”

•  “Despite the Iranian government’s protestations to the contrary, an earlier survey found that 67 percent believed that Iran’s nuclear program is intended to develop nuclear weapons rather than nuclear energy.”

• “Sixty-two percent believe that Iran sponsors terrorist activities against the United States.”

The operative word in “National Intelligence Estimate” is “Estimate.”  That’s what it is, an estimate, which appears to have been wrong in 2003 and could be wrong again.  For example, the NIE did not anticipate the Cuban missile crisis in 1962.

 

Writing in FrontPageMag.com, William R. Hawkins observed, “If one actually reads the new NIE summary, one finds vindication for the hard-line that the Bush administration has taken towards Iran, up to and including the initial invasion of Iraq. The NIE argues that the reason Iran ‘does not currently have a nuclear weapons program’ is that ‘the program probably was halted primarily in response to international pressure.’ And from where has that pressure primarily come? The United States, which has applied sanctions, pushed the Europeans and the U.N. to apply multilateral sanctions, and has repeatedly threatened military action to destroy Iranian nuclear facilities (in diplomatic language, refusing to take the military option off the table). But perhaps the most important action that got Tehran’s attention was the invasion of Iran’s neighbor, Iraq, to preempt Baghdad’s development of Weapons of Mass Destruction … The NIE summary states, ‘we cannot rule out that Iran has acquired from abroad – or will acquire in the future – a nuclear weapon or enough fissile material for a weapon.’” (Bush’s NIE Vindication, FrontPageMag.com, December 11, 2007)

 

Furthermore, just how is it possible to trust anything Iran may say when its president is a religious zealot “who believes his mission is to prepare for the return of the 12th ‘Hidden’ Imam, whose return from occultation would ... be accompanied by the establishment of Islam as the global religion?”  He has “… laid out an Apocalyptic vision in which Israel … becomes the final battleground in a long struggle between Islam and the West.” (Conservative Chronicle, “Is Iran irrational? Consequences are tremendous,” by Terence Jeffrey, December 12, 2007)

 

Intelligence gathering is not an exact science, so whatever conclusion may have been reached about whether Iran stopped trying to build a nuclear weapon in 2003 is not the primary consideration in dealing with the Iranians.   Whether they can be believed is.  And, for my part, they are not believable, any more than Hitler or Stalin was in the 1930s and ’40s.

 

© 2007 Harris R. Sherline,

All Rights Reserved

NOTE: Read more of Harris Sherline’s commentaries on his blog at “opinionfest.com.”