Back in November 2007, the National Intelligence Council (NIC) released a declassified summary of an authoritative National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) declaring with “high confidence” that four years earlier “Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program.” Buried in a footnote was the fact that the summary was only referring to one—and far from the most important—component of Iran’s nuclear project. The other portions of the Iranian bomb effort—most significantly, uranium enrichment—were continuing apace.
The damage caused by the misleading document was immense, and traveled in two directions. On one side, it had the political effect of removing any possibility of public support for a Bush administration military strike against Iranian nuclear facilities. What would be the point, after all, of destroying a weapons project that our intelligence agencies were declaring had already been halted?
On the other side, there was a boomerang effect on the intelligence community itself. By issuing an NIE that, at least in its publicly released form, was not merely transparently flawed but also blatantly political in its construction, the NIC inflicted severe damage to its own reputation for integrity.
The NIC has been trying for some time to back away from the embarrassment. But the problem is not easily solved. For it seems that the more NIC officials say, the more intellectually empty and perniciously political they look.
The latest absurdity comes from Dr. Mathew J. Burrows, a longtime intelligence insider with a background in European affairs, who carries the twin title of director of the Analysis and Production Staff and counselor to the Council.
The U.S. announced last September that Iran, for years, has been building in secret a second enrichment facility near the city of Qom. We continue to assess that Iran has the scientific, technical and industrial capacity to produce enough highly enriched uranium for a weapon in the next few years, if it chooses to do so, and eventually to produce nuclear weapons. . . .
Iran also continues to improve its ballistic-missile force, which enhances its power projection and provides Tehran a means for delivering a possible nuclear payload.
This is all fine, as far it goes. But then Burrows wades from the familiar facts above into analysis:
This is a clear instance of feeding the customer—in this case, the White House—exactly the “intelligence” that it wants to hear. For what message could be more perfectly tailored for Barack Obama’s policy preference? Both the administration’s ill-fated attempt last year to engage the ayatollahs, and its molasses-like approach this year to impose minimally punitive sanctions, are conveniently compatible with this judgment.
But far more egregious is Burrows’ contention “that Iran takes a cost/benefit approach in its nuclear decision-making.” There is a nice whiff of social science methodology in these words, but if one drops them into a solution and places them under a microscope, they dissolve into a truism.
Any set of decision-makers, no matter how irrational by our lights, can be said to be operating under a cost/benefit analysis. In building a bomb, the ayatollahs undoubtedly are weighing the costs and benefits of their conduct. But the costs, in their minds, might be dollars and cents. And the benefits might include something utterly transcendent, like the arrival of the Hidden Imam as a Mahdi, a personage to be recognized only by the simultaneous destruction of Israel in an atomic blast.
Any cost/benefit analysis worth its salt would yield only one result: It’s time to disband the National Intelligence Council and fire anyone and everyone in the intelligence community who is thinking about the ayatollahs in such facile terms.
