The Rorschach Test is a projective test. A person is shown a series of inkblots of various levels of complexity and is encouraged to describe what they "see" in the images. The goal is to facilitate the person revealing some of how his mind works via the descriptions, which have been normalized through the accumulation of thousands of descriptions through the years. The images a person "sees" in the inkblots are dependent upon their internal emotional states, character structure, psychiatric symptomatology, and a host of other, often unknown factors. We would be well advised to keep this in mind when considering the recent excitement aroused by the just released NIE.
Stratfor summarizes the NIE and its conclusions:
The NIE Report: Solving a Geopolitical Problem with Iran
By George Friedman
The United States released a new National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Dec. 3. It said, "We judge with high confidence that in the fall of 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program." It went on to say, "Tehran's decision to halt its nuclear weapons program suggests it is less determined to develop nuclear weapons than we have been judging since 2005." It further said, "Our assessment that Iran halted the program in 2003 primarily in response to international pressure indicates Tehran's decisions are guided by a cost-benefit approach rather than a rush to a weapon irrespective of the political, economic and military costs."
With this announcement, the dynamics of the Middle Eastern region, Iraq and U.S.-Iranian relations shift dramatically. For one thing, the probability of a unilateral strike against Iranian nuclear targets is gone. Since there is no Iranian nuclear weapons program, there is no rationale for a strike. Moreover, if Iran is not engaged in weapons production, then a broader air campaign designed to destabilize the Iranian regime has no foundation either.
It is incontestable that the NIE has lessened the chances of an American attack on Iran, though there remain analysts who are unconvinced.
The National Intelligence Estimate, released in its unclassified form on Monday, has provoked a surge in commentary in the MSM, the blogosphere, the Congress, and the commentariat. The most simple minded reaction has come from the far left, many members of which have apparently misplaced their vaunted nuance. Tony Hendra at the Huffington Post basically sums up their arguments in the title of his piece pressing for the impeachment of George Bush and Dick Cheney, Enough Spin Already: Bush and Cheney Lied, Iran Didn't.
Reactions from the right have been much more varied and interesting. Michael Ledeen (who has never called for a military attack on Iran) has doubts about the findings:
Those lively minds over at the (always capitalized) Intelligence Community have given us yet another of their entertaining Estimates, this time about the Iranian nuclear-weapons program. You know, the one the Iranians stoutly deny exists, the one they refuse to let inspectors examine, and the one they sometimes acknowledge when on or another of their leaders has a slip of the tongue. They now favor us with slightly more than two pages of "Key Judgments" on this important subject.
Two years ago, the IC — the same IC that claimed to have detailed information about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, that famously missed the boat on al-Qaeda, and that has had at least two spy networks inside Iran rolled up in the past couple of decades — told us it was all but certain that Iran was "determined to develop nuclear weapons."
He does acknowledge that new information (well documented by Old Spook) could conceivably have led to the changed findings, but his questions about the competency of our intelligence agencies, which have famously been surprised by India's nuclear bomb, missed Pakistan's nuclear bomb, had no idea Libya was only 6 months away from a bomb when Qaddafi gave up his program, and thought Iraqi WMD was a "slam dunk", make a high degree of confidence difficult to maintain.
Dinocrat offers some evidence to support two competing theories related to the idea that the NIE represents a political document designed to further a de facto diplomatic arrangement between Iran and the United States:
Thus, one main question about the report is determining whether (a) a strategy is being acted out but not announced by the Bush administration, or (b) dangerous bumbling and internecine warfare is taking place among the administration and the intelligence community.
John Podhoretz wonders about a sneak attack on the Bush administration from the intelligence agencies:
I must confess to suspecting that the intelligence community, having been excoriated for supporting the then universal belief that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, is now bending over backward to counter what has up to now been a similarly universal view (including as is evident from the 2005 NIE, within the intelligence community itself) that Iran is hell-bent on developing nuclear weapons. I also suspect that, having been excoriated as well for minimizing the time it would take Saddam to add nuclear weapons to his arsenal, the intelligence community is now bending over backward to maximize the time it will take Iran to reach the same goal.
But I entertain an even darker suspicion. It is that the intelligence community, which has for some years now been leaking material calculated to undermine George W. Bush, is doing it again. This time the purpose is to head off the possibility that the President may order air strikes on the Iranian nuclear installations.
A number of recent events that have made their way into the news, often under the radar, make the puzzle more confusing. For instance, the Israelis recently destroyed a Syrian target, variously reported as involved in developing nuclear weapons or, more ominously, involved in assembling nuclear weapons. Syrian and Iranian silence (along with some muted North Korean complaints) on the topic has been resounding. In the last month or two there have been reports of alerts in Europe, Israel, and the United States, of increased concerns over "dirty bomb" attacks. It is noteworthy that a dirty bomb is much easier to create than a nuclear bomb and does not require any actual testing. And then there is the farce that was Annapolis in which the leading Sunni Arab states (led by the execrable Saudi Arabia) presented all the evidence one might want that they are not yet ready to accept a Jewish state in the Middle East. Wheels within wheels.
Intelligence agencies, like the CIA, are well paid to be paranoid and devious. However, there are some very good reasons to believe that the NIE is operationally correct and one very good reason to worry that the final outcome will turn out to be the opposite of what everyone seems to believe.
The Bush administration knows that anything short of pictures of a nuclear warhead being loaded onto a missile would render any attack on Iran anathema, not just to the international community but to most Americans, who while slowly coming around to the occlusion that we are winning in Iraq, surely do not want to stir up the hornet's nest in Iran; the Iranian hornets are More like Tarantula Hawks than plain everyday wasps, in any event, and this is implicitly recognized by most Americans, including those in the White House. The Iranians have their own reasons for lowering the heat that has helped keep Iraq at a boil for the last several years, not least that they appear to have significant problems mastering the technology involved in building a bomb. As well, their version of realpolitik must include the calculation that the American-Sunni axis could, if pressed too far, destroy the Shia revolution. America is ripe to be, at least minimally, separated from the Sunni sphere (though the Saudi tentacles reach deep into the American political, academic, and media worlds) and any separation offers the Iranians greater room for movement. A decision to develop a nuclear program that allows assembly of a bomb on relatively short notice without actually taking the irrevocable steps that would invite an attack, makes a great deal of sense for Tehran.
Of course, almost all of this is conjecture.
In summary, anyone who suggests that they can tell you what the inkblots represent is either fooling you, fooling himself, or trying to sell you something. The good news is that an American attack on Iran and Iranian meddling in Iraq have diminished and the NIE both furthers and reflects that reality.
The wild card remains Israel, who just had their Intel agencies partially blinded, apparently by American pressure. Israel is facing existential threats from multiple sources and has a diminishing number of friends it can rely on. They cannot depend on "high confidence" intelligence when the price of error is extinction. Wouldn't you love to be a fly on the wall when President Bush visits Israel in January?
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