Last week saw the release of a National Intelligence Estimate concluding that Iran hasn't had an active nuclear weapons program since 2003. The NIE undercuts the rationale for the belligerent attitude toward Iran on the parts of President Bush and Vice President Cheney.
Floating in the air like balloons at a campaign rally are questions about why, when the President knew or should have known what was in the NIE last August, he spent the fall pumping up the rhetoric against Iran in a way that brought back memories of his speeches just prior to our invasion of Iraq. Iran's nuclear program will bring on World War III, he said, this time omitting the phrase about the smoking gun reincarnated as the mushroom cloud.
The NIE included, among other things, information culled from overhead satellite data; measurements of radioactivity in water samples and smoke from industrial installations and power plants in Iran; and readings from high-tech radioactivity detectors placed by American and Israeli spies in Iranian factories suspected to be producing nuclear weapons. These sources yielded no traces of "significant" amounts of radioactivity.
It's hard to imagine a worse day for the White House than a day on which it has to admit that anything Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says—that his country is not steaming toward possession of a nuclear warhead, for instance—is true. How can you believe a man who denies or, more recently, minimizes the Holocaust, even when he tells you what time it is?
But the fact that the Bush administration has so signally failed to deal with the complicated Ahmadinejad—who, for all his bluster, has shown by his appearances in the U.S. that he is more interested than Bush or Cheney in trying to explain himself to hostile audiences—is a sign of the lack of sophistication of their diplomacy. (One criterion for sophisticated diplomacy: the recognition that the truth is the truth no matter what its source.)
Granted, Ahmadinejad heads a regime marked by many forms of repression that are repugnant to Americans. So do the Saudi rulers with which this administration is extremely friendly. And American field commanders have reported that Iranians crossing the border to aid the insurgency are hardly more of a problem in Iraq than fighters from Saudi Arabia.
There's something else Ahmadinejad is telling the truth about: his country may have oil in the ground, but it does need energy. This information from the U.S. Department of Energy is also available to our president: "Iran produced 6 million bbl/d of crude oil in 1974, but has been unable to produce at that level since the 1979 revolution due to a combination of war, limited investment, sanctions, and a high rate of natural decline in Iran's mature oil fields. Iran's oil fields need structural upgrades including enhanced oil recovery (EOR) efforts such as natural gas injection. Iran's fields have a natural annual decline rate estimated at 8 percent onshore and 10 percent offshore, while current Iranian recovery rates are 24-27 percent, 10 percent less than the world average."
Notice the word "sanctions." The more we crack down on them through sanctions, the more determined the Iranians will become to develop nuclear sources, and so we have a cycle with no winner.
