Failure to uncover nukes in Iran is not surprising

FOR four years the Bush administration told us that Iran must be subject to sanctions, and maybe to military attack, because it was secretly working on nuclear weapons.

Suddenly, last week, the US intelligence agencies tell President George Bush that for the past four years Iran has NOT been working on nuclear weapons.

So he announces that unless Iran abandons its civil nuclear power program it must be subject to sanctions and maybe to military attack anyway, because “what’s to say they couldn’t start another covert nuclear weapons program?”.

Even the 16 US intelligence agencies that produce the National Intelligence Estimate didn’t expect to shake Bush’s bid to go after Iran.

That’s why they insisted the new estimate be declassified so quickly.

It was a pre-emptive strike against the White House, to make it more difficult politically for Bush.

Like the US armed forces, the intelligence services are in a state of near-mutiny as they watch Bush drag the country towards another unnecessary and unwinnable war.

But how come the same intelligence agencies were telling us two years ago with “high confidence” Iran was developing nukes?

I have been saying in this column all along that Iran probably has no immediate intention of developing nuclear weapons.

A few other people have been saying it, too, and if they come forward I’ll gladly join them in a bid to take over the provision of strategic intelligence to the US Government.

We’d do it for half the budget, give back a $1 billion every time we got it wrong, and still end up wealthy.

Because the intelligence agencies have a huge array of electronic and human “assets” that feed them a torrent of mostly irrelevant or misleading information in little bits and bites, whereas we outsiders just apply common sense and a little local knowledge to the process.

Common sense is no help at all when you are trying to figure out radio frequencies, missile ranges, and all the other technical details that the military wants to know about the armed forces of a potential rival.

For that, you need electronic intelligence-gathering and/or spies.

Strategic intelligence is a quite different matter, however, and here all the clutter of electronic and human data must be subordinated to a political analysis of the other country’s interests and intentions. But that rarely happens in practice.

If you just assume that the people running Iran are rational human beings and put yourself in their shoes, you can pretty easily figure out what their strategic concerns and priorities will be.

Obviously, they wouldn’t dream of attacking Israel with nuclear weapons even if they had any, because that would unleash a nuclear Armageddon on their own country.

Israel has hundreds of nuclear weapons, and the only imaginable use for a few Iranian ones would be to deter Israel from a first strike because of the risk of Iranian retaliation.

And why would Iran suddenly want such a deterrent now, when it has been a target for Israeli nuclear weapons for at least 30 years?

Ayatollah Khomeini cancelled the Shah’s nuclear weapons program after the revolution in 1979 because it was “un-Islamic”.

Tehran began the program again in the mid-80s in the Iran-Iraq war, when Saddam Hussein was working on nuclear weapons, and it stopped again after Iraq was declared nuclear-free in 1994.

We think it was restarted in 1999 or 2000, and now we are told that it stopped again in 2003.

That was the year when it became known that Iran was working towards a full nuclear fuel cycle for its civil nuclear power program.

That’s quite legal, but as it also gives the possessor the potential to enrich uranium to weapons grade, Iran came under international pressure to stop so it suspended the enrichment program for three years and stopped the weapons program.

It all makes sense, and you don’t need a single spy to figure it out. In fact, given the motives of most spies, you’re probably better off without them.