Posted on 12/05/2007 6:44:08 AM PST by shrinkermd
As recently as 2005, the consensus estimate of our spooks was that "Iran currently is determined to develop nuclear weapons" and do so "despite its international obligations and international pressure." This was a "high confidence" judgment. The new NIE says Iran abandoned its nuclear program in 2003 "in response to increasing international scrutiny." This too is a "high confidence" conclusion. One of the two conclusions is wrong, and casts considerable doubt on the entire process...
Our own "confidence" is not heightened by the fact that the NIE's main authors include three former State Department officials with previous reputations as "hyper-partisan anti-Bush officials," according to an intelligence source.
For a flavor of their political outlook, former Bush Administration antiproliferation official John Bolton recalls in his recent memoir that then-Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage "described Brill's efforts in Vienna, or lack thereof, as 'bull -- .'" Mr. Brill was "retired" from the State Department by Colin Powell before being rehired, over considerable internal and public protest, as head of the National Counter-Proliferation Center by then-National Intelligence Director John Negroponte.
No less odd is the NIE's conclusion that Iran abandoned its nuclear weapons program in 2003 in response to "international pressure." The only serious pressure we can recall from that year was the U.S. invasion of Iraq. At the time, an Iranian opposition group revealed the existence of a covert Iranian nuclear program to mill and enrich uranium and produce heavy water at sites previously unknown to U.S. intelligence. The Bush Administration's response was to punt the issue to the Europeans, who in 2003 were just beginning years of fruitless diplomacy before the matter was turned over to the U.N. Security Council.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
However, we see from the recent "delivery" by the North Korean cement ship that there are other means by which to obtain a weapon.
Does anyone really doubt that Ahmadi-Nutjob seeks desperately to own a bomb? And does anyone really doubt that he would use it?
Bush is one of the few realists in DC.
People need to know what intelligence is. Having some graduate studies in intelligence collection and analysis, and having worked in an “intel-lite” field, I’ve got an opinion on what intelligence really is.
Forget they intelligence cycle, or the textbook definition of “distilled knowledge”. Intelligence is an effort to create an informed opinion about a whole system, using only the available, incomplete pieces of that system.
Think about a puzzle. If you have a 1000 piece puzzle, and you’ve got 500, but you can only see the first 10 pieces in front of you, you might not have any idea what the picture will look like. Maybe your ten pieces fit together to give you a distinctive looking feature. Hypothetically, lets say you get a tan face of Teddy Roosevelt, and think the picture is Mount Rushmore. So, you go to the box and pull of the tan pieces and start putting them together to see if you have the rest of the faces. So, if you have some of Washington and Lincoln, and it’s big enough to cover the whole puzzle, then you might be confident you’re puzzle is Mount Rushmore. If it’s only 1/4 of the right size, maybe Rushmore is only part of it, and you start looking for pieces that look like other monuments. If you get tan pictures of other presidents, maybe it’s not Rushmore at all. That’s as good an analogy for intel collection and analysis as I can come up with, with the warning that you may have pieces from other puzzles, that don’t belong, in there too. Oh, except you never have time to finish the puzzle, and lives can be at stake.
Really, when you think about it, you can be reasonably sure about something with incomplete information. You can also be wrong, because you’ve got information that doesn’t actually belong in your analysis, or because people have lied to you, or because you just happened to get all of the pieces that didn’t fit first, and you can’t know they didn’t fit.
What we should expect from our intel folks is that they find the best processes and follow them as well as they can. That will give them the greatest likelihood of being right as often as possible. It never guarantees 100% accuracy, and you cannot create an atmosphere that discourages people from throwing out their own conclusions and starting over. The worst mistakes are continuing with bad thinking, because you can’t see past it, or you are afraid to admit you are wrong (not just intel, but any analysis work). Very often I’m wrong at work (no one dies because my work isn’t important), but almost always, my answers were the best I or anyone else could come up with given our time and information limits. (BTW, wrong doesn’t mean what I said was going on wasn’t happening, it usually means time frames or magnitude, etc. were off) Every time I figure out that I’m wrong, I try to make my estimates better. That’s all you can do.
Whether is another good analogy. I change my plans based on the chance of a specific kind of weather, and how much that weather impacts on my plans. For example, I’ll make travel plans if there is a 40% chance of light snow, I might not if it’s 90%. I wouldn’t stain my deck when there was a 10% chance of rain, because that would ruin it, and I had the time to push back my deck staining. But we know that the weathermen aren’t right all the time, and we’d be crazy to assume they were wrong all of the time, or to completely ignore them.
We’ve learned nothing post 9/11. Our most important intellligence institutions are still political hacks. The forgotten agenda is defending this country.
What this really means is that the US will not militarily confront Iran. Israel is on its own.
Wall Street Journal agrees with much of the speculation from yesterday’s Newsmax article.
Our own "confidence" is not heightened by the fact that the NIE's main authors include three former State Department officials with previous reputations as "hyper-partisan anti-Bush officials," according to an intelligence source.
The Van Diepen Demarche --(more on the Iran NIE and the Nukes pursuit)
World War IV by Norman Podhoretz, page 133...
Bush made no secret of his repudiation of realism, and he did not pussfoot around it:
“For decades, free nations tolerated oppression in the Middle East for the sake of stability. In practice, this approach brought little stability and much oppression, so I have changed this police.”
...Bush was equally forthright - almost brutal - in giving the back of his hand to the realist prohibition against using force to transform the internal character of other states:
“Some who call themselves realists question whether the spread of democracy in the Middle East should be any concern of ours. But the realists in this case have lost contact with a fundamental reality: America has always been less secure when freedom is in retreat; America is always more secure when freedom is on the march.”
I agree.
In the citation you provided, Bush said:
But the realists in this case have lost contact with a fundamental reality:
Perhaps Bush is more of a realist than the tolerators, who he says are out of touch with reality.
The jury is still "out" on that deliberation.
“Ahmadinejad is harmless” bump
President Bush has said he hopes it's true, but the US won't give up on it's surveillance of Iran. As Reagan used to say, "Trust, but verify".
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