Middle East Strategy at Harvard

From Mark T. Clark

The November 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran’s nuclear program set off a storm of controversy and criticism. I critiqued only one part of it in an earlier post. I believed then, as I believe now, that the report was flawed intellectually as it relied an academic assumption that the Iranian leadership behaves as a rational actor that decides through a traditional “cost-benefit” calculus. However, there were other substantive criticisms that touched on its many other problems, not the least of which was what kind of intelligence could have led to a reversal of the intelligence community’s earlier judgment on Iran’s nuclear program.

The 2007 report showed that our intelligence officials judged with “high confidence” that Iran had stopped the military component of its nuclear program in 2003 and with “moderate confidence” that it had yet to restart that component by mid-2007. The thrust of the report, however, rocked the administration’s policy towards Iran’s nuclear weapons program and helped stifle its efforts towards containing or reversing the Iranian program.

This past week, however, we’ve seen two new developments that challenge this view, though they may not improve the administration’s ability to stop the Iranian program. The first development occurred in Israel. The director of the Mossad, Meir Dagan, reported to Israel’s foreign affairs and defense committee that it judged Iran will develop a nuclear weapon within three years.

The second development occurred in the United States. In his Annual Threat Assessment of the Intelligence Community, Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell recast the report in a slightly modified form. He acknowledges that the most difficult challenge of nuclear production, uranium enrichment, continues under the Iranian regime. In addition, whereas the 2007 report glosses over whether Iran could have restarted its covert weapons program as of mid-2007, McConnell’s report changes the tone significantly. He says: “We assess with moderate confidence that Tehran had not restarted these activities as of mid-2007, but since they comprised an unannounced secret effort which Iran attempted to hide, we do not know if these activities have been restarted.”

This last admission is interesting in light of the fact that Israel earlier had agreed that Iran halted its covert military program in 2003, but restarted it elsewhere soon after.

Is the intelligence community backtracking or hedging its bets against the future? I do not know. I do hope, however, that these developments encourage junior intelligence officers to challenge the “mainstream” view of our senior intelligence officials. Far too often we have experienced intelligence failures because the “mainstream” view failed to account for the unpalatable. Many low- to mid-level intelligence officers were deeply disturbed by the Iranian NIE’s “consensus” view, when in fact, their views were not even considered.