The Guardian today leads with the story that a US National Intelligence Estimate, which pulls together the work of the 16 American intelligence agencies, concluded: “We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003 Tehran halted its nuclear weapons programme.” Whoops. What are the neo-conservatives going to do now? The article goes on to say:

In a startling admission from an administration that regularly portrays Iran as the biggest threat to the Middle East and the world, the NIE said: “We do not know whether [Iran] currently intends to develop nuclear weapons.” That contradicts the assessment two years ago that baldly stated that Tehran was “determined to develop nuclear weapons”.
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Although a halt to the nuclear weapons programme is significant, the NIE is far from a clean bill of health for Iran. Tehran is pushing ahead with its uranium enrichment programme, which has only limited civilian use and could be quickly converted to nuclear military use. The NIE warned that Iran could secure a nuclear weapon by 2010. The US state department’s intelligence and research office, one of the agencies involved, said the more likely timescale would be 2013. All the agencies concede that Iran may not have enough enriched uranium until after 2015.

Which, in my view, indicates that while diplomatic pressure must remain on the country to avoid building nukes, there is no viable reason to go to war with the country to protect Israeli sovereignty anytime soon. In case that wasn’t already obvious.

The decision to publish the NIE is aimed at trying to recover the public credibility lost when the agencies wrongly claimed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction in the years leading up to 2003.

No shit sherlock.

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