U.S. intelligence's surprising conclusion that Iran halted its nuclear-weapons program four years ago started redrawing political lines yesterday, as Democratic presidential candidates clashed over the issue and major powers stated their aversion to coercive action against Tehran.
China, a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, indicated it would oppose a new round of economic sanctions against Tehran in light of the new national intelligence estimate. European diplomats said it will be harder to build consensus in the European Union for tough action to get Iran to suspend its nuclear program. Even Arab countries, historically fearful of Iran, are showing reluctance to back an aggressive U.S. strategy to challenge Iran.
The new thinking on Iran presented trouble for Hillary Rodham Clinton, who has been the most hawkish voice among Democratic presidential candidates. In a debate in Iowa yesterday, the New York senator faced attacks from virtually all her rivals. They noted she was the only one of four sitting senators in the race to have voted with the White House when it called on Congress to brand Iran's Revolutionary Guards a terrorist organization.
The report has reopened long-simmering tensions between military hard-liners in the Bush administration and the intelligence community. A number of American hawks, both inside and outside the administration, charged that intelligence services were playing down the Iranian nuclear threat in an excess of caution after their 2002 reports on Iraq proved to overestimate Saddam Hussein's nuclear ambitions.
In the wake of the Iraq debacle, Congress reorganized U.S. intelligence, creating a director of national intelligence, a post now filled by Mike McConnell. That office now issues the intelligence estimates and oversees the Central Intelligence Agency, which was effectively demoted in the bureaucratic hierarchy.
"Make no mistake: This national intelligence estimate has been written by people who've been reading about Iraq for years," said a U.S. official working on Iran. He criticized the report as lacking enough data on Iran to draw meaningful judgments.
And he said a number of officials working on the Iranian sanctions were blindsided by the report, only having gotten wind of it Monday afternoon. "There are a lot of conservatives in this administration who don't believe this report," the official said.
President Bush said the findings wouldn't change American policy toward Iran. At a news conference yesterday, he vowed to press ahead with coercive measures aimed at forcing Iran to suspend its nuclear activities. Mr. Bush sought to refute charges his administration oversold Iran's nuclear capabilities in recent months, saying he only learned of the intelligence community's conclusions last week.
The intelligence estimate said Iran is still aggressively enriching uranium and producing nuclear fuel. Iran says its nuclear activities are for peaceful purposes, but the U.S., European nations and others charge that Tehran isn't meeting treaty obligations to disclose its entire nuclear program.
The president said the report underscored the need for the international community to prevent Iran from developing nuclear materials that could be converted to military use. He said he and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice have been calling leaders in China, Russia and elsewhere to make this point. "I think the NIE makes it clear that Iran needs to be taken seriously as a threat to peace," Mr. Bush said. "My opinion hasn't changed."
But the president appeared momentarily rattled by a barrage of critical questions, including some that linked the flip-flop on Iran intelligence to earlier U.S. errors on Iraq. The White House announced late yesterday that Mr. Bush will visit the Middle East next month to promote Arab-Israeli peace talks.
China's ambassador to the U.N. seized on the report as proof that Beijing's measured strategy towards Iran has been the correct course. "I think the [Security] Council members will have to consider [the report], because I think we all start from the presumption that now things have changed," Wang Guangya told reporters in New York.
The French and British governments publicly supported President Bush's position and said Europe remains committed to pressuring Iran to suspend its enrichment activities. But representatives of these governments said they were concerned the report would undermine consensus among the European Union countries for sanctions against Iran.
Spain, Italy and Germany all enjoy robust trading relationships with Iran and are seen as reluctant to push Tehran. Germany's exports and imports from Iran totaled $5 billion last year. "For us, it will be more difficult to exert due pressure on our partners," said a European diplomat working on the sanctions issue.
In the Arab world, regional analysts said the new intelligence assessment could undermine resolve to confront Iran. This week an Iranian leader, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, for the first time addressed a gathering of the Gulf Cooperation Council, which comprises the six key Persian Gulf countries.
"If I had to describe one word from the Gulf today, it would be confusion," said Emile El-Hokayem, a Persian Gulf analyst at Washington's Henry L. Stimson Center, an independent research institute. Without a consensus in the U.S. on confronting Iran, he said, "there's likely to be a growing willingness now to accommodate Iran, as a result of the report."
Israeli officials voiced the most alarm about the fallout. Israeli officials have emphasized the worst-case assessment of their intelligence agencies, which recently predicted Iran could have a nuclear bomb by the end of 2009.
"The impact is clear," a senior Israeli diplomat said. "People who want to drag their feet now have the perfect excuse. . . . A lot of work has to be done to repair this."
The Bush administration has presented to Congress a plan to sell tens of billions of dollars in new arms to the Gulf states, as well as Egypt and Israel. They have justified these sales, in large part, by saying these countries need to defend themselves against Iran's rising military might.
Some senior U.S. lawmakers said they want to reconsider the plan. "I have concerns about the timing, and I have concerns about the need" for these sales, said Sen. Joseph Biden, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. "Thus far, the justification hasn't been made to me."
Sen. Biden was speaking from Des Moines, just before joining a Democratic presidential debate in the state that kicks off the nominating contest with a caucus on Jan. 3. The new Iran report dominated the first part of the two-hour session, and Mr. Biden joined Illinois Sen. Barack Obama and others in using the news to question Sen. Clinton's judgment on foreign policy.
Mrs. Clinton branded her opponents' attacks as "outlandish political charges." But coming at a time when her standing in the polls has been slipping, the new assessment on Iran threatens her position among pacifist Iowa Democrats already wary of her support for the Iraq war five years ago.
The report also seems to be opening up old wounds from 2002 and 2003 in the intelligence community, which has been faulted for shading its doubts about Saddam Hussein's weapons programs to please political leaders eager to depose him.
Several current and former intelligence officials said the new intelligence estimate marked an attempt by career officers to declare independence from the Bush administration, particularly as its term nears an end. They said the report was based on more then 1,000 source notes and disregarded political pressures.
"This is ours," said one intelligence official, referring to the NIE. "This is intelligence community analysts interacting with collection people."
However, the officials acknowledged that faulty intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction continues to weigh on analysts. "We were exceptionally careful" in preparing the report, said another senior intelligence official, "not only because of the obvious importance of the subject, but because of the lessons learned from the case of the Iraq WMD estimate produced in 2002."