On the other fronts, the outlook is not so encouraging. Iran was given a great gift with the National Intelligence Estimate’s de facto clean bill on nuclear proliferation, a finding that undermined almost all current multilateral efforts to embargo or boycott the theocracy until it is transparent about enrichment.
Somehow our politically tainted intelligence agencies argued the near laughable: claiming that Iran stopped making the bomb in 2003 (so that we need not worry now), and yet insisting that such abrupt cessation had nothing to do, as was true in the case of Libya, with our removal of Saddam Hussein (so that no one gets any credit). Far from drawing us back from the brink, the naïve and politicized findings — meant to restrain the much caricatured Bush — have instead only eroded much of the peaceful avenues to prevent Iran’s acquisition of a nuclear weapon (Stanley Kurtz has argued here).
Read it here.
