Apparently not, according to some politicos. The popular editorial cartoon take on this news is to ask "What to Believe?", and present some comparison scenario between this recent turn of events and that of 2003, when we were told that Iraq had WMDs. Note the added emphasis of mine to contrast the supposed comparison. That difference is paramount to understanding the two situations. The standard line is that since the intelligence was wrong before, what can we trust? Well, for one, to chalk up the failures of the Iraq War to mere "bad intelligence" is simply foolhardy. The problem was not necessarily getting bad information (which did indeed occur), but that information was cherry-picked to try to support a predetermined conclusion (which itself was based on poor assumptions). Since the push by this administration has been for war with Iran, publishing an intelligence report which refutes that conclusion presents an entirely different situation. Making the comparison is then just lazy.
But this willful ignorance is as great a sin as the outright spin-and-deny from the Hawks on this issue. You can find editorials from the likes of people like John Bolton which attempt to put the kibosh on the entire finding, arguing such things that there was no diplomacy involved with Iran (only the war with Iraq has put any pressure) and that should conflate civilian and military technology, without considering that it's probably pretty easy to monitor civilian uses of the technology. But there was error that was particularly egregious, and that was his contention that "the NIE suffers from a common problem in government: the overvaluation of the most recent piece of data." This just makes me laugh, because the exact opposite problem was what led to the mistaken invasion of Iraq--because of "anchoring", we refused to reconsider our assumptions as new information was gathered that challenged our assumption that Iraq had a functioning weapons program. If anything, what Bolton states usually does NOT occur, and shows that a better decision-making skills are taking place.
The funniest part of the backlash by the hawks to this report is their attempt to explain the reasoning behind this sudden change in outlook. There was one feature Op-Ed in The Oregonian which asserted that Bush was trying to wash his hands of the Iran "problem", and was passing the buck to the next administration. This is of course totally in line with the thinking of this administration, which has pushed for war at every opportunity, and warned of a potential WWIII just last week would suddenly change course. We have seven years of evidence that definitively prove otherwise.
Now I'm not saying that everything is totally safe with Iran. As always, it's best to proceed with caution, and to always keep an eye on the situation. That's why we continue to try to obtain intelligence. But we can't repeat the same mistakes that we committed in the past. We can't assume that a regime is "just crazy", and fail to consider the simple cost/benefit analysis that other regimes go through. Iran is in some ways calling plays from the same playbook as Iraq, what with their resistance to international efforts in their powerplay to assert themselves as the regional hegemon. We have to remember that these people still understand cost/benefit analysis and balance-of-power reasoning, and that their decisions are not irrational.
Just don't expect to start a war with even less evidence than you had before.
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