Ehud Olmert was notably expansive on pretty much every issue during the briefings he gave to the Israeli journalists who traveled with him to and from Annapolis last week. The prime minister talked at great length about the possible road ahead in negotiations with the Palestinians. He talked about the significance of Syrian and Saudi participation at the conference. He talked about the stability of his coalition. He talked about the teachers' strike.
Only on one issue did he clam up: his discussions with President Bush about the threat posed by Iran's nuclear program. He noted dryly that he and the president had been discussing this most critical of issues for a long time. He said vaguely that the latest conversations had been interesting. He emphatically did not repeat the assertion he frequently made until about a year ago - that he was confident Bush, one way or another, would ensure Iran did not attain nuclear weapons.
Days after Olmert returned home, the reasons for his uncharacteristic restraint are now clear. On Monday, the US director of national intelligence released "key judgments" from an assessment backed by all 16 US spy agencies to the effect that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program four years ago and probably has not restarted it since. These startling findings, reversing an estimate two years ago that Iran was determined to develop nuclear weapons, were received and debated at the very top of the Bush administration two weeks ago, and plainly formed a centerpiece of the Bush-Olmert talks.
The fallout has been immense: delight in Iran, where President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been strengthened, his fiery defiance apparently vindicated; the immediate raising of new reservations against intensified sanctions on Iran from some of the already reluctant international players; an eruption of American criticism of Bush's perceived exaggerated talk of the need to stop Iran or face World War III; a flood of expert analyses concluding that the report kills off any prospect of the Bush administration resorting to military intervention against Teheran in its final months; and open skepticism from Israel, where Defense Minister Ehud Barak has all but dismissed the best efforts of America's intelligence agencies as plain wrong.
No wonder Olmert preferred to stay out of Iranian territory when the Israeli press pack sought details last week.
Splashing the new intelligence estimate over much of its front page on Tuesday, The New York Times, in keeping with the overall tone of American media coverage of the report, used the subheadline "Major Reversal" and opined that the "New Intelligence May Force a Reshaping of Bush's Policy."
But beyond the headlines, a close reading of the material released from the National Intelligence Estimate offers little legitimate reason for any sense of relief. Quite the opposite. Along with the opening judgment that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 comes the immediate caveat that "Teheran at a minimum is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons." And then, just a few paragraphs later, comes an undermining of the original, headline-making assessment. The authors acknowledge that "because of intelligence gaps" they can "assess with only moderate confidence that the halt to these activities represents a halt to Iran's entire nuclear weapons program."
After that, the reservations and flat-out terrifying assessments in this supposedly sanguine estimate flow thick and fast. The authors state in their opening paragraphs alone: "We do not know whether [Iran] currently intends to develop nuclear weapons." "We cannot rule out that Iran has acquired from abroad - or will acquire in the future - a nuclear weapon or enough fissile material for a weapon." "We assess centrifuge enrichment is how Iran probably could first produce enough fissile material for a weapon, if it decides to do so. Iran resumed its declared centrifuge enrichment activities in January 2006 … [and] made significant progress in 2007 installing centrifuges at Natanz."
And the further the report continues, the more worrying its text becomes: "Iranian entities are continuing to develop a range of technical capabilities that could be applied to producing nuclear weapons…" "We assess with moderate confidence that convincing the Iranian leadership to forgo the eventual development of nuclear weapons will be difficult…" "We assess with moderate confidence that Iran would probably use covert facilities - rather than its declared nuclear sites - for the production of highly enriched uranium for a weapon." And finally, "We assess with high confidence that Iran has the scientific, technical and industrial capacity eventually to produce nuclear weapons if it decides to do so."
This, remember, is the ostensibly exculpatory report. This is the assessment that is being widely interpreted as conveying to America's political leadership that it can afford to relax, if only a little, and that the warnings of the past were overheated. This is the documentation being used by some of Bush's would-be successors to accuse him of having irresponsibly overstated the threat posed by Iran. Yet what it is actually saying, on careful reading, is that the Iranians are bent on achieving a nuclear weapons capability, have the skills to do so and have established covert programs for doing so, are determinedly expanding the uranium enrichment activities crucial to such a goal, and can be expected to again switch to covert strategies when they make their final push for a nuclear device.
What's also striking about this purported intelligence volte face is that its bottom line is essentially unchanged from the original assessment of two years ago. The compilers of the 2005 estimate - the assessment that set American alarm bells ringing louder than ever about Iran's nuclear ambitions - wrote that Iran was unlikely to make a nuclear weapon "before early-to-mid next decade." The new report actually says much the same: "We judge with moderate confidence Iran probably would be technically capable of producing enough highly enriched uranium for a weapon sometime during the 2010-2015 time frame." It also notes an earlier deadline, however, stating that "the earliest possible date Iran would be technically capable of producing enough HEU [highly enriched uranium] for a weapon is late 2009, but that this is very unlikely." Late 2009? That is in line with some of Israeli intelligence's most alarming estimates.
