It’s now official: you can chuck the December 2007 National Intelligence Estimate on Iran’s nuclear program in the dustbin. According to the Los Angeles Times, President Obama has spoken, and said, unambiguously, that Iran is developing “a nuclear weapon.” The French agree. From a report released by the French National Assembly in late December 2008: “At the end of ten months of work, [the commission of inquiry] has acquired some certainties, notably the conviction that Iran’s nuclear program pursues military objectives.”
Future historians will have a field day with those hapless intelligence experts who drafted the NIE in such a way as to wipe out any residual credibility of a U.S. military strike against Iran in the last year of George W. Bush’s presidency, thereby also undermining sanctions efforts by the rest of the international community — especially if it turns out that the NIE helped push Iranian scientists to the finish line this year.
