Chapomatic

Okay, so the new national intelligence estimate for Iran is out. I know this because even with a limited opportunity to hear or see news, I’ve been bombarded with this piece of information. Not the actual estimate, mind you, but with portentious summaries of What It All Means based on redacted snippets. I’m writing this post in reaction to a bumper sticker post by Enrevanche, because that post irritates the bejeebers out of me.

Before I go anywhere else I should link to the actual documents. Here’s the press release, and the unclassified summary, both in .pdf form.

I’d like to take my own thoughts about this into several categories.

1. Intelligence products are guesses. They aren’t perfect and are often wrong. The batting average of intel is worth considering when making decisions.
2. I observed that the release of the national intelligence estimate on Iran (NIE) got big press in many outlets. This is not normal. I think it’s a political act.
3. We’re talking about nuclear weapons, which have many different styles.

My own bias: I believe the CIA-NYT combination indicates that the reporting is designed for a purpose at odds with the administration; I want to see Iran not have nuclear weapons or to make them for others to use, and I am concerned about how high stakes geopolitical negotiations change when the use of force is not at issue.

Intelligence Products Are Guesses
I’ve been associated with consumers or producers of intelligence products for a couple of decades now. A while back, when the New York Times was getting blood on their hands by printing highly classified material on their front page, I wrote about some aspects of classification. I observed that the higher classification goes, the less reliable it is, and the fewer people get to see it. I’ve seen people present finished products with raw information that was hopelessly out of date, plain wrong from my own experience, or attempting to drag someone to a conclusion.

It’s not the job of an intel guy to provide a decision. Colin Powell had a four point plan that I’m recalling from memory:

1. Tell me what you know.
2. Tell me what you don’t know.
3. Tell me what you think.
4. Tell me the difference.

This is subtle but powerful, and was done long before Rumsfeld’s poetic restatement of that of a Greek philosopher I can’t recall. I can brief the Boss on my intel product and tell him I think something’s happening, but only after I say what I know and don’t know and clearly delineate which is which…and leave the decision to the guy what decides them.

The more refined the product you see, the more people sign off on it, the more bland it is, the more CYA it becomes–and the more useless it is. Stansfield Turner wrote about his fellow CIA directors, and mentioned how some of their deliveries to the President were rather useless.

And that’s a good point. Intel is not truth. Let me repeat that. Intel is wrong by definition, is incomplete, inaccurate, unknowably wrong. Sometimes you can rely on intel, but not always and if the other guy wants you to know nothing or know something untrue then intel is harder. Without knowing sources and methods and veracity of same, how can anyone look at the unclassified NIE and know anything other than the fact that the unclassified NIE exists?

Decisions get made with incomplete information. The NIE as released is spectacularly incomplete, with no way to know how incomplete.

Except for one thing. One quarter ago, the same document was about 180 degrees different. What changed? Why? Is there a reason? Is there an action to take internally (NIE process) or externally?

This In The News Was A Political Act
You remember, perchance, the Armed Forces Journal article that bashed the Generals? You might remember it because it showed up in the New York Times and thus NPR and everywhere else.

Do you remember any other Armed Forces Journal cover stories?

I didn’t think so. The imprimatur of the NYT drove a narrative. Now let’s add another thing to the mix. We know there’s a direct link between sources in the CIA and the NYT because the NYT arguably has killed people by its releases of highly classified information and has caused political difficulty for the administration and the work guys in DoD do. You think maybe that source or sources don’t understand the political implications of a release like this? Or anyone in political sympathy with that source?

You know by any chance what the current NIE for any other country has in it?

Our governmental method builds in resistance to getting anything done. The CIA has more than one branch, each of which has a much different culture. I think the NIE wording was guided and it’s big in the news because of its potential use in internal politics. I also think that there are international implications as well but maybe not the ones the releasers would like.

This Ain’t Building X-Boxen
Once you have the stuff, you don’t have to take long to make a bomb. You could delay to make a bigger bang, or put it on a better delivery platform, but a basic bomb was done the first time in only a few years. It’s a lot faster to do something after it’s been done for a while.

I’d like to remind y’all that the tech for nuclear weapons is over sixty years old. The really big booms, the ones with special esoteric materials and extremely sensitive geometry and extra Stretch Armstrong flexible action, are really hard. If you want a boom to just kill a metric ton or two of people, what you need is some knowledge and the right kind of material and you’re on your way to wiping any Middle Eastern democracy you pick right off the ol’ map. A whole lot of people have the basic knowledge to make a fizzle or better–and the use of nuclear weapons changes the character of the war.

One of those materials is uranium that has a few more neutrons per atom than the usual uranium. If you extract the uranium from the ore, you have to spend a lot of money and energy and stuff using methods to separate the more boom-ish uranium from the rest. This is enrichment. Most power plants don’t need that kind of enrichment–and oh, by the way, the Iranians have a deal with the Russians for power-grade fuel. Or, of course, you could deal with plutonium. Gosh. I wonder what that Nork facility is manufacturing.

So what you can do to counter proliferation, besides trying to wipe out the A.Q. Khan network and the related Brownian movement of technicians, knowledge, materials and assets between the DPRK, Iran, Syria and other fun vacation spots, is make it harder to collect all these evil Pokemon. Most of those efforts you hear about are related to that.

But if you make some of that bomb stuff, have some knowledge, and have some time and money you can enable a few megadeaths. So this is what’s in the back of the mind of people working policy decisions on how to further U.S. national interest vis-a-vis Iran. If you think that war is bad, well; there are wars and there are wars, aren’t there? If you woke up one day and Dallas is John Hersey’s Hiroshima done up an order of magnitude, what would you have done a while before to make that not happen?

Conclusion
I think the unclassified NIE itself is noise, and says less than the fact of its release and promotion. I also think the NIE is going to be used as a weapon for ineffectually beating the administration–ineffectually because there’s a good chance the people making the decisions knew the less processed intel already.

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Here’s a list of some instant reaction:

• Steve Shippert has an analysis of NYT reporting about the NIE. Look carefully at the narrative frame being described.
  

  After citing President Bush’s statements in 2005 about the difficulty of proving Iran’s nuclear intentions, Broad and Sanger draw us back to their apparent faith in the current NIE and take a quick shot at defining the narrative.

  Now, he could end his presidency with even his own intelligence apparatus uncertain about Iran’s true intentions.

  I’m sorry, Mr. Broad and Mr. Sanger, but it’s our intelligence apparatus, not his. And our intelligence apparatus has never been certain about Iran’s true intentions. Not under President Bush and not under any previous president. Never. It’s intelligence, not recorded history.

  Their article is worth noting for the typical blur it represents between reporting and editorializing that has come to mark far too much of American media coverage. Perhaps we’re conditioned by now, but words mean things, and writers understand the tools of their trade as much as any other professional.

• Apparently Congress is making ‘looking into it’ noises about the rapid change in position.
• This Power Line post mentions Caroline Glick’s take:
  

  The US National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran’s nuclear intentions is the political version of a tactical nuclear strike on efforts to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear bombs.

  The NIE begins with the sensationalist opening line: “We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Teheran halted its nuclear weapons program.” But the rest of the report contradicts the lead sentence. For instance, the second line says, “We also assess with moderate-to-high confidence that Teheran at a minimum is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons.”

  Indeed, contrary to that earth-shattering opening, the NIE acknowledges that the Iranians have an active nuclear program and that they are between two and five years away from nuclear capabilities.

  The NIE’s final sentence: “We assess with high confidence that Iran has the scientific, technical and industrial capacity eventually to produce nuclear weapons if it decides to do so,” only emphasizes that US intelligence agencies view Iran’s nuclear program as a continuous and increasing threat rather than a suspended and diminishing one.

  But the content of the NIE is irrelevant. The only thing that matters is the opening line – as the report’s authors no doubt knew full well when they wrote it. With that opening line, the NIE effectively takes the option of American use of force to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons off the table.

• Michael Ledeen points out that the NIE’s focus stinks:
  

  The most interesting part of the “Estimate” is of course its political and policy implications, which National Security Adviser Steven Hadley was quick to spell out. In his view, and in that of many political leaders and pundits, if Iran does not have a nuclear weapons program, there is no great urgency to move against the mullahs.

  And indeed, those “intelligence professionals” were very happy to take off their analytical caps and gowns and put on their policy wigs: “Although the officials as a rule, respecting the norms of their craft, declined to offer policy prescriptions based on their findings, the most senior official present did cite the finding that the Iranians are susceptible to international pressure and say that such pressure should ‘continue’ as a way to ‘allow IAEA to have significant visibility into the program.’”

  This sort of blatant unprofessionalism is as common in today’s Washington as it is unworthy of a serious intel type, and I think it tells us a lot about the document itself.

• Stephen Peter Rosen, the author of Winning The Next War, points out the implications of what “the Iranians stopped in 2003″ means.
• The Israelis are saying they think the NIE’s wrong.
• Eric over at Classical Values says “who’s in charge of the contradictions?“
• Soccer Dad’s got a big roundup as well.
• A presidential candidate showed ignorance of the NIE, which doesn’t bode well for how the guy either considers policy or gets briefed about what’s going on that day. Even if the candidate doesn’t care about the NIE, he should know he’s going to get questions on it if only to be prepared to issue a non-answer. Hot Air’s whacking Huckabee over this.
• Neptunus Lex reminds us that Iran and the US may be looking at different games to make their moves.
• Instapundit, on the other hand, thinks there’s a possibility of a still different game, and that’s a bit like doing a fade.
• Ace speculates on why the conclusions changed so quickly. Could it be….? Nah.
• Although the New York Times says the pivot came from some notes someone found. What, is this the Great Game of Post-Its?
• Joe Conason thinks the report changed the world. Sorta.
• Hot Air’s Bryan speculates on the internal Pentagon politics related to the NIE release. Also, HA points to Alan Dershowitz not liking this either, and this comment on another post:
  

  Gee; let’s see
  Botched up Kim’s daddy’s intentions.
  Botched up China’s Yalu river resolve.
  Botched up Russia’s H-bomb.
  Botched up Russia’s space program.
  Botched up Ho Chi.
  Botched up Cambodia.
  Botched up the Pueblo.
  Botched up Tet.
  Botched up Panama. (76..someone just elected put the breaks on it)
  Botched up Iran.
  Botched up USSR falling.
  Botched up Kuwait.
  Botched up Osama.
  Botched up Towers 1.
  Botched up African bombings.
  Botched up Towers 2.
  Botched up WMD.
  Botched up Iraq.

  I guess it is time they got it right. Iran has cancelled their nuke program. Bout time they got it right. Hats off to NIEs and the politicians that read them.

• Mark Falcoff reminds us that intel is not always perfect:
  

  I’d like to make a few observations.

  The first is that most Americans don’t understand that the CIA is divided into two different divisions–estimates and operations. Most Americans, and I suppose most foreigners, imagine that the CIA spends all its time on operations. Actually the vast majority of resources are put into estimates. Mover, the two sides of the house, as they call it, have nothing whatever to do with each other. They are kept completely apart.

  The other misconception is that the same kinds of people work on both sides of the house. Wrong again. The operations guys conform pretty much to the stereotype of Hollywood films–ex-military or professional spooks. The estimates guys are mostly academic types who couldn’t find a job teaching at a university when they got their Ph.D. Politically and culturally they are absolutely indistinguishable from the career people at the State Department. You can imagine what that means in the present context of Bush-hatred.

  My other comment is this. NIE’s are not necessary accurate. Sometimes they are wildly inaccurate. I invite anyone to go to “Foreign Relations of the United States: Cuba, 1958-1960″ and read what was said about Fidel Castro before he took power. Another example: a week before Somoza collapsed in Nicaragua, the NIE of the day claimed he was bound to remain in power indefinitely. I haven’t looked at the NIE for Iran the week before the Shah departed, but I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if it said something similar.

  Let me add a further note. In 1986 I was working for the Kissinger Commission on Central America and as such I was allowed to see the NIEs on all the relevant countries in the circum-Caribbean. I vividly recall the one on Mexico. Among other things it claimed that the foreign minister of that country was an embittered leftist married to a Soviet citizen. As it happens, I knew the son of the couple (he has since become foreign minister of Mexico in his own right) and I knew for a fact that his mother was not a Soviet citizen. Far from it. She was a nice Jewish lady who lived in New York and grew up in Brooklyn. It is, I suppose, possible that she was brought to the US in the 1920s from the Soviet Union–at age 3. But there is a crucial difference between that and what was in the NIE. The implications for our foreign policy were very different. At the time I wondered, Who checks this things out? I still wonder.

  Let me add that with one signal exception–a report on Mexico prepared for President Clinton before he made his state visit there–I have never seen a piece of analysis by the CIA that could not have been written by a bright high school student. And this is what we spend billions of dollars on every year.

• Regis John Bolton excoriates the NIE, too. Read the whole thing, but here’s a teaser.
  

  Consider these flaws in the NIE’s “key judgments,” which were made public even though approximately 140 pages of analysis, and reams of underlying intelligence, remain classified.

  First, the headline finding — that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 — is written in a way that guarantees the totality of the conclusions will be misread. In fact, there is little substantive difference between the conclusions of the 2005 NIE on Iran’s nuclear capabilities and the 2007 NIE. Moreover, the distinction between “military” and “civilian” programs is highly artificial, since the enrichment of uranium, which all agree Iran is continuing, is critical to civilian and military uses. Indeed, it has always been Iran’s “civilian” program that posed the main risk of a nuclear “breakout.”

  The real differences between the NIEs are not in the hard data but in the psychological assessment of the mullahs’ motives and objectives. The current NIE freely admits to having only moderate confidence that the suspension continues and says that there are significant gaps in our intelligence and that our analysts dissent from their initial judgment on suspension. This alone should give us considerable pause.

  Second, the NIE is internally contradictory and insufficiently supported. It implies that Iran is susceptible to diplomatic persuasion and pressure, yet the only event in 2003 that might have affected Iran was our invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, not exactly a diplomatic pas de deux.

• Finally, the Jacksonian has a heck of an interesting process description of how this sausage gets made. It’s a good reminder that we’re talking about the product of a bureaucracy here.