U.S. intelligence assessments are written under the assumption that they will not be read. They are usually “headline documents,” meant to generate news stories that fit the ideological worldview of those writing the assessments.
So, regarding Iran for example, the intelligence community has assessed that Iran has enriched a large amount of uranium to a level far beyond what is needed for civilian purposes. In other words, Iran is building the components of a nuclear bomb.
The conclusion, however, is presented as: We don’t know if Iranian leaders have decided to build a bomb.
That conclusion is subjective. The useful part of the report is that the intel clearly lays out proof that Iran is doing something for which there is no other explanation other than building a nuclear bomb.
The next question is: How quickly could the Iranians develop that bomb once they decide to do so? According to Gen. Michael Kurilla, the head of U.S. Central Command, it would take a week. According to the Mossad, it would probably take 15 days.
In other words, if you believe all the intelligence presented above, including by dovish U.S. analysts, it doesn’t matter whether spies have intercepted a text message from Ayatollah Khamenei to his brother-in-law’s niece’s fencing tutor saying that he has decided that this is the week he is going to build the bomb.
If Iran has what it needs to build a bomb within seven days, that material must be taken away from them.
Iran spends most of its time and energy threatening Israel’s existence and building the contraption that would fulfill this threat. Israel has no option except to interfere with Iran’s ability to fulfill its threat.
Unsurprisingly, the U.S. media isn’t convinced. The media routinely compares the American president to Hitler and says you can’t wait for him to start building the death camps in order to organize against him, yet that same media believe a Hitlerite ayatollah whose express intention is to finish what Hitler started must be given the benefit of the doubt until he kills millions of Jews.
The New York Times puts it this way:
“Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, issued a religious ruling, or fatwa, in 2003 that has prevented the country from developing nuclear weapons. That is ‘right now holding,’ a senior intelligence official said, adding that the Israeli assessment that Iran was 15 days away was alarmist.”
Once you resume reading the article after you’ve laughed yourself out of your chair and then recovered, you read the following: “Still, American officials acknowledge that the large stockpile poses a threat.”
Oh, you think?
What exactly is happening here? Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has been excluded from recent inner-circle discussions about whether the U.S. should finish off Iran’s nuclear program. The reason for this is that she has been publicly undermining the president’s policy preferences. In response, her staff appears to be leaking information selectively contextualized to publicly undermine the president’s aims.
But do they actually undermine the president? CNN’s Aaron Blake thinks they do. Trump’s recent assertion that Iran is weeks away from nuclear breakout is “very difficult to square with the March testimony of Trump’s own director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard,” who told Congress that “her own intelligence community ‘continues to assess Iran is not building a nuclear weapon.’”
Yet those two points are obviously noncontradictory. Iran could be weeks away for as long as it wants before deciding to build the bomb. The point is that once the regime gets close enough to a bomb there wouldn’t be enough time to stop it from doing so.
Which raises another point worth emphasizing: Israel’s strikes on Iran’s program and its air defenses have widened Iran’s breakout window. Thus Israel has given the West time it wouldn’t have had otherwise. Whether the U.S. decides it should get involved in the air campaign is separate from whether Israel’s airstrikes were beneficial to the cause of nuclear nonproliferation: There is simply no question at all that they are not only beneficial to that cause but arguably essential.
Israel is not going to wait for some U.S. intel analyst to decide that Khamenei woke up on the wrong side of the bed. As soon as he does, it’ll almost surely be too late. And too late is not an option for Israel.
