On Iran, I'm surprised nobody is stating the obvious: Because we have no diplomatic relations with Tehran or embassy presence there, we don't know squat about its nuclear program or nuclear intentions. How then can our intelligence agencies claim with a straight face they have "high confidence" about anything that's going on there?
Here's why: They can't, at least not with any reasonable confidence. President Bush spoke of "hundreds of pieces of data" and other spooks spoke of "multiple streams of intelligence." Really? I find that doubtful and awfully hard to corroborate. After all, we have no spies on the ground, no diplomats pumping flesh in Tehran or Isfahan. American intelligence still relies on poor communications intercepts and unreliable satellite imagery, not to mention questionable sources abroad and other "Curveball" types. The existence of Iran's plant at Natanz, for instance, was released by the Marxist-Islamist Iranian opposition group Mujahadeen-e-Khalq (MEK), a sketchy source if there ever was one (and terrorist organization to boot). It is always wise to be suspicious of expatriate groups--remember Chalabi?--whether in "Tehrangeles" or in Washington (even Americans abroad have a warped view of what's going on in the States).
So where else has this deluge of newfound intelligence sprung from? Let's see, we have a new "listening post" in Dubai -- much like our station in Riga that spied on the Soviets during the cold war -- that for some dumb reason was advertised to the world by the State Department last year. Iranians have dubbed the post the "regime-change office." Then, there are Iranian defectors. The most prominent of these was perhaps Ali Reza Asgari, a Revolutionary Guards official who fled to Turkey this past summer. But officials deny the U-turn in our intelligence estimate came solely from him. There are Iranian scientists and academics who shuttle back and forth between the West and Tehran and sometimes spirit out laptops with sensitive info. Then, of course, there are other spy agencies, notably Britain's, Israel's, and Germany's, which have agents on the ground and feed us vital information (I love how Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte told Jim Lehrer last night that our intelligence is "second to none." Really Mr. Secretary? Then how come other agencies aren't banging down our door for intel on Iran?)
Here's the deal: We still know scarily little about the inner workings of the Iranian government, as well agencies like the Revolutionary Guards. But weirdly that doesn't stop fearmongers in Congress (Hillary Clinton, et al) from branding the whole lot of them "terrorists," or prevent our our in-the-dark-until-last-week President from recklessly warning of "World War III"--a variant on Godwin's law, from the leader of the free world no less. Any report that claims "high confidence" about anything going on in Iran, be very suspicious of. Until more formalized relations between America and Iran are established and the U.S. flag flies above an embassy there rather than gets trampled upon in the streets, most of what we know will be guess-work at best. So let's cut the rush-to-judgment foreign policy that favors regime change and seems based more on what Sy Hersh writes than on what the Supreme Leader says.
As Rumsfeld might have put it, we have to approach states like Iran with the intelligence we have, not the intelligence we want. Hence, that requires a smart and cautious foreign policy based on patchy intelligence. A good start would be dispatching Condi to the region to meet with her Iranian counterpart. A good finish would be the re-normalization of relations, even if hostilities remain and we never become the best of buddies. That I can say with high confidence.