More on whether it’s likely a strategy
Like you, we’re trying to figure out what is going on with the US and Iran after the stunning news yesterday regarding Iran and the flip-flop NIE. NIE’s are an iffy business. Some of the critiques of various NIE’s over the decades and the people who prepare them are both funny and scary. A NIE has a pretty good chance of being wrong, without even adding bad intentions or ideology into the mix. And the anti-Bush agendas of some of the NIE authors are troubling. These are important things to bear in mind.
Having said that, on balance today we think that the release of the revised NIE is part of a strategy. We don’t necessarily go as far as the worthies at Stratfor, who think a deal’s already been done between the US and Iran: “The NIE indicates that Washington and Tehran have made significant progress in this back-channel back-and-forth, and that the positive signs coming out of Iraq lately have culminated in some sort of agreement.”
However, events in Iraq have indeed been promising, and often detrimental to Iranian interests, giving Iran perhaps reason to cut a deal. And the mysterious and flawlessly executed September 6 raid by Israel and the US on the Syrian/Korean/Iranian nuclear facility seems possibly to have significance in these events (was an important part of an outsourced Iranian nuclear effort destroyed in the course of one night?) But finally it was President Bush’s own words that have brought us to today’s position, subject to further revision of course. You will note in these remarks from his press conference the President’s offering certain carrots to Iran, as well as recalling in significant detail the specifics from four years ago. This is a man who is clearly engaged on the issue of Iran:
there is a better way forward for the Iranians. Now, in 2003, the Iranian government began to come to the table in discussions with the EU-3, facilitated by the United States. In other words, we said to the EU-3, we’ll support your efforts to say to the Iranians, you have a choice to make: You can continue to do policy that will isolate you, or there’s a better way forward, so that it was the sticks-and-carrots approach.
You might remember the United States said at that point in time, we’ll put the WTO on the table for consideration, or we’ll help you with spare parts for your airplanes. It was all an attempt to take advantage of what we thought was a more open-minded Iranian regime at the time — a willingness of this regime to talk about a way forward. And then the Iranians had elections, and Ahmadinejad announced that — to the IAEA that he was going to — this is after, by the way, the Iranians had suspended their enrichment program — he said, we’re going to stop the suspension, we’ll start up the program again. And that’s where we are today.
My point is, is that there is a better way forward for the Iranians. There has been a moment during my presidency in which diplomacy provided a way forward for the Iranians. And our hope is we can get back on that path again.
So President Bush is clearly signaling an openness to new negotiations with Iran — those negotiations that Stratfor believes have already been consummated, at least in broad terms. (And clearly the 2005 NIE was a stumbling block to those negotiations; it was eliminated in the most classic of Washington ways, by simply being declared inoperative.) But was perhaps most interesting about what Bush said was an apparent outright falsehood in response to a reporter’s question:
David, I don’t want to contradict an august reporter such as yourself, but I was made aware of the NIE last week. In August, I think it was Mike McConnell came in and said, we have some new information. He didn’t tell me what the information was; he did tell me it was going to take a while to analyze. Why would you take time to analyze new information? One, you want to make sure it’s not disinformation. You want to make sure the piece of intelligence you have is real. And secondly, they want to make sure they understand the intelligence they gathered: If they think it’s real, then what does it mean? And it wasn’t until last week that I was briefed on the NIE that is now public.
Nearly every word of that paragraph does not ring true, and appears absurd on top of it. The director of the DNI and formerly the NSA says he has “new information” on Iran’s nuclear ambitions that will be reduced to a NIE report, and neither party discusses it? And the rest of the paragraph makes no sense unless they had in fact discussed what the findings were. It sounds like a cover story, and a poor one at that for a man who has been deeply engaged on the issue of Iran and WMD for years. The President tortured plausible deniability until it became Implausible Deniability. But why bother to try to create deniability for the President at all, unless the decision to go public with this NIE at this time was part of a larger superstructure of negotiations with Iran that had already been put in place by an executive decision at the highest level.