{"id":174,"date":"2008-02-10T04:07:07","date_gmt":"2008-02-10T08:07:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/mesh\/2008\/02\/nie-redux\/"},"modified":"2008-04-07T12:09:03","modified_gmt":"2008-04-07T16:09:03","slug":"nie-redux","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mesh\/2008\/02\/nie-redux\/","title":{"rendered":"NIE redux"},"content":{"rendered":"

From <\/strong>Mark T. Clark<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

The November 2007 National Intelligence Estimate<\/a> (NIE) on Iran\u2019s nuclear program set off a storm of controversy and criticism. I critiqued only one part of it in an earlier post<\/a>. 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 \u201ccost-benefit\u201d 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\u2019s earlier judgment on Iran\u2019s nuclear program.<\/p>\n

The 2007 report showed that our intelligence officials judged with \u201chigh confidence\u201d that Iran had stopped the military component of its nuclear program in 2003 and with \u201cmoderate confidence\u201d that it had yet to restart that component by mid-2007. The thrust of the report, however, rocked the administration\u2019s policy towards Iran\u2019s nuclear weapons program and helped stifle its efforts towards containing or reversing the Iranian program.<\/p>\n

This past week, however, we\u2019ve seen two new developments that challenge this view, though they may not improve the administration\u2019s ability to stop the Iranian program. The first development occurred in Israel. The director of the Mossad, Meir Dagan, reported to Israel\u2019s foreign affairs and defense committee that it judged Iran will develop a nuclear weapon within three years.<\/p>\n

The second development occurred in the United States. In his Annual Threat Assessment of the Intelligence Community<\/a>, 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\u2019s report changes the tone significantly. He says: \u201cWe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cmainstream\u201d view of our senior intelligence officials. Far too often we have experienced intelligence failures because the \u201cmainstream\u201d view failed to account for the unpalatable. Many low- to mid-level intelligence officers were deeply disturbed by the Iranian NIE\u2019s \u201cconsensus\u201d view, when in fact, their views were not even considered.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From Mark T. Clark The November 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran\u2019s 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1620,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1812,622,2261,2223],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-174","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-intelligence","category-iran","category-mark-t-clark","category-nuclear"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mesh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mesh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mesh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mesh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1620"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mesh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=174"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mesh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mesh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=174"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mesh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=174"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mesh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=174"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}