IRAN's Nuclear Issue

An administration that had cited Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons as the rationale for an aggressive foreign policy — as an attempt to head off World War III, as President Bush himself put it only weeks ago — now has in its hands a classified document that undercuts much of the foundation for that approach-NYT

December 4, 2007

Bush Says Iran Still a Danger Despite Report on Weapons
By BRIAN KNOWLTONWASHINGTON, Dec. 4 —

President Bush said today that a new intelligence finding that Iran halted its nuclear weapons work in 2003 had not altered his sense that Iran remained a danger.
The world needed to view the report as “a warning signal,” not grounds for reassurance, he said, and the United States would not renounce the option of a military response.
“I have said Iran is dangerous,” Bush said a day after the release of the National Intelligence Estimate, representing the consensus of all 16 American spy agencies, “and the N.I.E. doesn’t do anything to change my opinion about the danger Iran poses to the world — quite the contrary.”
The report was welcomed by Iran today, which said it confirmed Tehran’s frequent protestations that its nuclear program has a purely civilian aim.
But it left some United States allies feeling uncertain about the way ahead. Key partners like France and Britain, in line with the administration response, said the report underscored that past concerns about Iran were well-founded.
But the assessment clearly complicated efforts to impose new sanctions on Iran at the United Nations Security Council, offering cover to Russia and China, two members most skeptical of sanctions.
Mr. Bush said that earlier in the day he had spoken at some length to President Vladimir Putin of Russia about Iran but declined to provide details.
“I think it is very important for the international community to recognize the fact that if Iran were to develop the knowledge that they could transfer to a clandestine program, it would create a danger for the world,” he said.
Reporters pressed the president to explain why as recently as October, he was saying that a nuclear-armed Iran could pose a risk of a “World War III.” But Bush said he had learned of the new intelligence findings on Iran, which have been in the works for months, only last week. When a reporter asked whether anyone in the intelligence community had urged him to step back from his tough warnings about Iran, he said, “No.”
Mr. Bush also denied that the United States’ credibility had suffered in light of the N.I.E. report, arguing instead that it reflected a more rigorous approach to intelligence.
“I want to compliment the intelligence community for their good work,” he said. “Right after the failure of intelligence in Iraq, we reformed the intelligence community.”
He said the new assessment was one result of those changes, adding, “The American people should have confidence that the reforms are working.”
The president insisted that the U.S. approach to Iran of “carrots and sticks,” he said had been vindicated by the fact that Iran had halted its weapons program.
“This is heartening news,” he said. “To me it’s a way for us to rally our partners.”
When another reporter offered the apologetic observation that the president looked “dispirited.” Mr. Bush rejected that with a laugh, accusing the journalist of practicing “Psychology 101.”
In Tehran, Iran welcomed what it said was the United States decision to “correct” its claim of an active Iranian nuclear weapons program, The Associated Press reported.
Manouchehr Mottaki, the foreign minister, said it was natural that Tehran would welcome “countries that correct their views realistically, which in the past had questions and ambiguities” about Iranian nuclear activities.
Germany, one of the three West European governments involved in diplomacy with Iran, seemed to cast the American assessment in the most positive light. The finding, said a spokesman for the foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, demonstrated that the dual-track approach “to give incentives on the one hand and impose punitive measures at the Security Council was the right approach.”
In London, a spokesman for Prime Minister Gordon Brown said that Britain still saw a risk of Iran acquiring nuclear weapons, adding, “in overall terms the government believes that the report confirms we were right to be worried about Iran seeking to develop nuclear weapons.”
France said that its position in favor of tighter sanctions had not changed, Reuters reported from Paris. “Our position remains unchanged,” Pascale Andreani, a Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, said. “It appears that Iran is not respecting its international obligations. We must keep up the pressure on Iran.”
The Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, said that the report only strengthened the need for the international community to tighten sanctions so that Iran will not be able to produce nuclear weapons, The Jerusalem Post reported.
Mr. Olmert said that the N.I.E. assessment was brought up during his meetings with Washington officials following the Middle East Peace conference in Annapolis, Md., last week.
Mark Mazzetti contributed reporting from Washington and Elaine Sciolino from Paris.

December 4, 2007
News AnalysisAn Assessment Jars a Foreign Policy Debate About Iran
By STEVEN LEE MYERSWASHINGTON, Dec. 3 —

Rarely, if ever, has a single intelligence report so completely, so suddenly, and so surprisingly altered a foreign policy debate here.
An administration that had cited Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons as the rationale for an aggressive foreign policy — as an attempt to head off World War III, as President Bush himself put it only weeks ago — now has in its hands a classified document that undercuts much of the foundation for that approach.
The impact of the National Intelligence Estimate’s conclusion — that Iran had halted a military program in 2003, though it continues to enrich uranium, ostensibly for peaceful uses — will be felt in endless ways at home and abroad.
It will certainly weaken international support for tougher sanctions against Iran, as a senior administration official grudgingly acknowledged. And it will raise questions, again, about the integrity of America’s beleaguered intelligence agencies, including whether what are now acknowledged to have been overstatements about Iran’s intentions in a 2005 assessment reflected poor tradecraft or political pressure.
Seldom do those agencies vindicate irascible foreign leaders like President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, who several weeks ago said there was “no evidence” that Iran was building a nuclear weapon, dismissing the American claims as exaggerated.
The biggest change, though, could be its effect on President Bush’s last year in office, as well as on the campaign to replace him. Until Monday, 2008 seemed to be a year destined to be consumed, at least when it comes to foreign policy, by the prospects of confrontation with Iran.
There are still hawks in the administration, Vice President Dick Cheney chief among them, who view Iran with deep suspicion. But for now at least, the main argument for a military conflict with Iran — widely rumored and feared, judging by antiwar protesters that often greet Mr. Bush during his travels — is off the table for the foreseeable future.
As Senator Chuck Hagel, Republican of Nebraska, put it, the intelligence finding removes, “if nothing else, the urgency that we have to attack Iran, or knock out facilities.” He added: “I don’t think you can overstate the importance of this.”
The White House struggled to portray the estimate as a validation of Mr. Bush’s strategy, a contention that required swimming against the tide of Mr. Bush’s and Mr. Cheney’s occasionally apocalyptic language.
The national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, said the estimate showed that suspicions about Iran’s intentions were warranted, given that it had a weapons program in the first place.
“On balance, the estimate is good news,” Mr. Hadley said, appearing at the White House. “On one hand, it confirms that we were right to be worried about Iran seeking to develop nuclear weapons. On the other hand, it tells us that we have made some progress in trying to ensure that that does not happen. But it also tells us that the risk of Iran acquiring a nuclear weapon remains a very serious problem.”
Mr. Hadley insisted, as he and others have, that the administration had hoped and still hoped to resolve the outstanding questions about Iran’s nuclear programs using diplomacy, not force. But the nuances of his on-this-hand-on-the-other argument will probably make it much harder to persuade American allies to accept the administration’s harder line.
One official pointed out that the chief American diplomat on the Iran question, Under Secretary of State R. Nicholas Burns, had just met with counterparts from Europe, Russia and China, and had seemed to make some headway on winning support for a third round of sanctions by the United Nations Security Council. The official said Mr. Burns could not divulge the intelligence findings at that meeting on Friday because Congress had not been briefed.
The immediate task for Mr. Burns and other administration officials is to untangle the confusion caused by its own statements and findings and to persuade skeptics that this time, the United States has it right about what Iran was doing before 2003 and what that means for what it might do in the future.
“The way this will play is that the intelligence community has admitted it was wrong,” said Jon B. Alterman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “So why should we believe them now?”
Mr. Hadley said the drastic reversal in the intelligence agencies’ knowledge about Iran’s weapons programs was based “on new intelligence, some of which has been received in the last few months.”
He also said that he and other senior officials, including Mr. Cheney, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates, had reviewed it and debated it two weeks ago.
With some of the administration’s most prominent hawks having departed and not taking part in the review of findings like these, it is possible that the zeal for another military conflict has diminished. After all, the first two wars on Mr. Bush’s watch remain unresolved at best.
Senator Hagel said he hoped that the administration might in its final year in office show the kind of diplomatic flexibility it did with North Korea over its nuclear weapons or with the conference in Annapolis, Md., last week on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He has previously called for the United States to open direct and unconditional talks with Iran to end the state of enmity that has existed since 1979.
He said Iran’s halt of weapons activity had created an opening for such talks, indicating, as the assessment does, that Iran’s government may be more rational than the one that Mr. Bush said in August had threatened to put the entire region “under the shadow of a nuclear holocaust.”
“If we’re wise here, if we’re careful, I think we have some opportunities,” Mr. Hagel said.
The findings, though, remain open for interpretation, as they always do, even in documents meant to reflect the consensus of the intelligence community. When it comes to Iran, at odds with the United States on many fronts beyond the nuclear question, hawks remain.
“Those who are suspicious of diplomacy are well dug in in this administration,” said Kurt M. Campbell, chief executive officer of the Center for a New American Security.
John R. Bolton, the former ambassador to the United Nations, who recently left the administration and began to criticize it, sounded very much like Mr. Hadley on Monday, saying the assessment underscored the need for American toughness. He said Iran’s intentions would always remain a concern as long as it continued to enrich uranium.
“The decision to weaponize and at what point is a judgment in the hands of the Iranians,” he said. He added that the finding that Iran halted a weapons program could just mean that it was better hidden now.

December 5, 2007
Israel Unconvinced Iran Has Dropped Nuclear Program
By STEVEN ERLANGER and GRAHAM BOWLEY
JERUSALEM, Dec. 4 — Israel today took a darker view of Iran’s nuclear ambitions than the assessment released by United States intelligence agencies yesterday, saying it was convinced that Iran was pursuing nuclear weapons.
It said Iran had probably resumed the nuclear weapons program the American report said was stopped in the fall of 2003. “It is apparently true that in 2003 Iran stopped pursuing its military nuclear program for a certain period of time,” Defense Minister Ehud Barak told Israeli Army Radio. “But in our estimation, since then it is apparently continuing with its program to produce a nuclear weapon.”
Israel led the reaction around the world today to the new intelligence assessment released in the United States on Monday that Iran had halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003.
Iran welcomed the report. “It is natural that we welcome it,” the Iranian foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, told state-run radio. “Some of the same countries which had questions or ambiguities about our nuclear program are changing their views realistically.”
The International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna said the new assessment should now help ease the international confrontation with Iran and prompt it to cooperate fully with the United Nations nuclear watchdog. The agency had been criticized in the past by the Bush administration for not pressing Iran hard enough on its nuclear intentions.
“This new assessment by the U.S. should help to defuse the current crisis,” the atomic energy agency’s director general, Mohamed ElBaradei, said in a statement.
“At the same time, it should prompt Iran to work actively with the I.A.E.A. to clarify specific aspects of its past and present nuclear program as outlined in the work plan and through the implementation of the additional protocol.”
But the United States, Britain and France urged the international community to maintain pressure on Iran to stop its nuclear enrichment activities despite the new assessment.
“We think the report’s conclusions justify the actions already taken by the international community to both show the extent of and try to restrict Iran’s nuclear program and to increase pressure on the regime to stop its enrichment and reprocessing activities,” a spokesman for British Prime Minister Gordon Brown was quoted by Reuters as saying.
“It confirms we were right to be worried about Iran seeking to develop nuclear weapons and shows that the sanctions program and international pressure were having an effect,” he said.
France expressed a similar opinion. “It appears that Iran is not respecting its international obligations,” a French Foreign Ministry spokeswoman was quoted by Reuters as saying.
“We must keep up the pressure on Iran,” the spokeswoman said, adding that France will continue “to work on the introduction of restrictive measures in the framework of the United Nations.”
At a meeting with Iran’s top nuclear negotiator, Saeed Jalili, today in Moscow, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia said Iran should ensure its nuclear activities were “open and transparent,” Bloomberg reported. Mr. Putin’s spokesman said Russia was offering to supply Iran fuel for the Russian-built nuclear power plant at Bushehr, in southern Iran, with the intention of persuading Iran to suspend uranium enrichment, Bloomberg reported.
“The sooner we ship it, the less they will have a need for their own program,” the spokesman, Dmitri Peskov, was quoted as saying.
The new American intelligence assessment comes at a sensitive time, when the six powers involved in negotiating with Iran — the United States, China, Russia, Britain, France and Germany — have decided to press ahead with a new United Nations Security Council resolution.
Iran had maintained since 2003, when it started negotiations with the three European countries, France, Germany and Britain, that its program was peaceful and not meant for military purposes. It insisted that it wanted to enrich uranium to produce nuclear fuel for its nuclear reactors.
However, the West had accused Iran of having a clandestine nuclear program. The Security Council has already imposed two sets of sanctions on Iran for its defiance to halt its enrichment program.
With his comments today, Mr. Barak, the Israeli defense minister, came close to contradicting the American assessment of “moderate confidence” that Tehran had not restarted its nuclear weapons program by mid-2007 and that the halt to the weapons program “represents a halt to Iran’s entire nuclear weapons program.”
While the Americans think Iran has stopped its nuclear weapons program while continuing to enrich uranium as rapidly as it can, Israel thinks that Iran has resumed its nuclear weapons program with the clear aim of building a nuclear bomb.
Israel must act in accordance with its intelligence estimates, Mr. Barak suggested. “It is our responsibility to ensure that the right steps are taken against the Iranian regime. As is well known, words don’t stop missiles.”
Assessments may differ, Mr. Barak said, “but we cannot allow ourselves to rest just because of an intelligence report from the other side of the earth, even if it is from our greatest friend.”
Mr. Barak also said the apparent source of the new American assessment on the weapons program was no longer functioning. “We are talking about a specific track connected with their weapons building program, to which the American connection, and maybe that of others, was severed,” Mr. Barak said cryptically.
It was only today that Israel received and began to assess a copy of the classified American report, which is believed to run some 130 pages, Israeli officials said.
Mark Regev, a spokesman for Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, said diplomacy remained the correct path for now to deter Iran from developing a nuclear bomb. But he was explicit about the Israeli conclusion that Iran’s intention is military, not civilian.
“We believe that the purpose of the Iranian nuclear program is to achieve nuclear weapons,” Mr. Regev said. “There is no other logical explanation for the investment the Iranians have made in their nuclear program.”
Some of the differences on estimates for when Iran could be capable of producing a bomb are slight, with a matter of a few months between Israel’s estimate of late 2009 or early 2010 to Washington’s 2010-2015. “A lot of it is splitting hairs,” Mr. Regev said. “Is it 2009 or 2010? Is it likely or very likely? These words are vague.”
Mr. Olmert, who had been briefed on the new assessment in Washington last week, tried to play down the gap in judgments with Washington. “According to this report, and to the American position, it is vital to continue our efforts, with our American friends, to prevent Iran from obtaining nonconventional weapons,” he said.
The American assessment said Iran probably halted the weapons program “primarily in response to international pressure,” a judgment Israel embraced as a call for further diplomatic action.
But Israeli experts on Iran said the American report would make any action against Iran less likely, whether diplomatic or military, and would probably kill or dilute American-led efforts to pass another sanctions resolution through the United Nations Security Council.
Efraim Kam, a former Israeli military intelligence official on Iran and deputy director of the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University, said the report “makes it very hard for anyone in the United States or Israel who was thinking of going for a military option.”
If American intelligence thinks there is no military nuclear program, “that makes it harder for Israel to go against it,” he said, since an Israeli attack would require operational coordination with Washington, “and will also make it harder to pass tougher sanctions. A lot of countries will be happy to go along with that — Russia, China — it’s a gift for the Iranians.”
He said the American assessment surprised him. “The report says its assessment is correct for now, but it could change any time,” he said. “Maybe the Iranians assessed that it was better for them to halt the military program and concentrate on enriching uranium,” which takes a long time, “and then go back to it.”
Iran was shocked this week when Chinese banks refused loans to Iranian businessmen, probably because of American pressure.
The head of the Iran-China chamber of commerce said Monday that over the past week Chinese state banks had refused to open a letter of credit for Iranian businessmen, the daily Etemad reported.
“The banks have not given any reason for these restrictions yet,” he said, adding that a trade delegation was in Beijing to discuss the restriction and that Iran’s central bank was also negotiating with the Chinese.
Graham Bowley reported from New York. Nazila Fathi contributed reporting from Tehran, and Isabel Kershner from Jerusalem.