There is a fascinating article in Sunday's New York Times about the current intelligence evidence against Iran and it's claims of having a peaceful nuclear program. It is fascinating on two fronts. First, there are the actual facts and figures of the intelligence and the descriptions of Iran's activities. Second, there is the section detailing how frayed America's reputation for quality intelligence is after the Iraq war claims turned out to be so wrong.
But as to the first part: it seems that a good portion of American intelligence related to Iran is coming from an intercepted laptop computer full of data related to weaponized nuclear development.
The computer contained studies for crucial features of a nuclear warhead, said European and American officials who had examined the material, including a telltale sphere of detonators to trigger an atomic explosion. The documents specified a blast roughly 2,000 feet above a target - considered a prime altitude for a nuclear detonation.
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In August 2003, agency inspectors discovered traces of uranium concentrated to the high levels necessary for a bomb, rather than the low levels for a power-producing reactor. Some of the uranium was shown to have arrived in Iran on nuclear equipment purchased from Pakistan, but a European diplomat disclosed that the origin of the rest was still a mystery.
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If Iran hid parts of its atomic program, it boldly displayed its missiles. And in August 2004, it conducted a test that deepened suspicions that it was at work on a nuclear warhead.
Tehran test-fired an upgraded version of the Shahab - shooting star in Persian - in a flight that featured the first appearance of an advanced nose cone made up of three distinct shapes. Missile experts noted that such triconic nose cones have great range, accuracy and stability in flight, but less payload space. Therefore, experts say, they have typically been used to carry nuclear arms.
Interesting. Why does Iran need such missiles? Unless there is a dual-purpose use that isn't being mentioned in this article, there seems to be no good explanation that is consistent with Iran's claims that it is not intent on producing nuclear weapons.
Now, let's turn to America's credibility on all this. Where has the Iraq war left us in the eyes of other nations?
doubts about the intelligence persist among some foreign analysts. In part, that is because American officials, citing the need to protect their source, have largely refused to provide details of the origins of the laptop computer beyond saying that they obtained it in mid-2004 from a longtime contact in Iran. Moreover, this chapter in the confrontation with Iran is infused with the memory of the faulty intelligence on Iraq's unconventional arms. In this atmosphere, though few countries are willing to believe Iran's denials about nuclear arms, few are willing to accept the United States' weapons intelligence without question.
"I can fabricate that data," a senior European diplomat said of the documents. "It looks beautiful, but is open to doubt."
"Few are willing to accept the United States' weapons intelligence without question." That is most certainly a bad thing. If we can't convince our allies (and that's who we are talking about here: France, Britain, Germany, etc.) without having to show them everything we have taken a major step backward. There used to be a day when an American president could simply say that he had the intel and that would be good enough for our allies (see Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis), but the Iraq war has destroyed that trust. Here's more:
In fact, some nations that were skeptical of the intelligence on Iraq - including France and Germany - are deeply concerned about what the warhead discovery could portend, according to several officials. But the Bush administration, seeming to understand the depth of its credibility problem, is only talking about the laptop computer and its contents in secret briefings, more than a dozen so far. And even while President Bush is defending his pronouncements before the war about Iraq's unconventional weapons, he has never publicly referred to the Iran documents.
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Officials said scientists at the American weapons labs, as well as foreign analysts, had examined the documents for signs of fraud. It was a particular concern given the fake documents that emerged several years ago purporting to show that Saddam Hussein had sought uranium from Niger. Officials said they found the warhead documents, written in Persian, convincing because of their consistency and technical accuracy and because they showed a progression of developmental work from 2001 to early 2004.
As a measure of the skepticism the Bush administration faces, officials said the American ambassador to the international atomic agency, Gregory L. Schulte, was urging other countries to consult with his French counterpart. "On Iraq we disagreed, and on Iran we completely agree," a senior State Department official said. "That gets attention."
This is what we're reduced to now. We have to get the French to sign off on our intelligence to make it legitimate in the eyes of our allies. Far from triumphing over the French as many a commentator on Fox News would like us to do, we have now brought the French to the exact position of unearned importance that they desire. That plan certainly backfired.
Analysts from the Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory wrote the briefing paper for the State Department, which distributed it widely. In graphic detail, the paper offers a tour of the previously hidden sites, saying, for instance, that a "dummy" building at the centrifuge plant in Natanz hides a secret entrance ramp to an underground factory.
The briefing asserted that Iran did not have enough proven uranium reserves to fuel its nuclear power program beyond 2010. But it does have enough uranium, the report added, "to give Iran a significant number of nuclear weapons."
The briefing landed with something of a thud. Some officials found its arguments superficial and inconclusive. "Yeah, so what?" said one European expert who heard the briefing. "How do you know what you're shown on a slide is true given past experience?"
Those mobile biological weapons labs from Colin Powell's U.N. speech will haunt us for a while. Our evidence is no longer good enough to stand on its own two feet, even when our allies agree with the justification for our argument. That demonstrates just how far we have fallen.
We need to recover our credibility. If anything, this loss of credibility could limit our ability to keep America safe. The more hoops we have to jump through to show that we have solid intelligence and not another "Curveball", the more we risk our national security. We need to fix this credibility gap, and we need to do so with some urgency.
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