Fwd: [NC-Prager Group] Going Wobbly

Following is a rather lengthy response to points raised during Dennis Prager's interview woth George Friedman (STRATFOR).

I won't say Friedman's failure to address the points raised here are necessarily lethal. In a broadcast hour, there is an average of 33½ minutes of actual broadcast time, the rest being ads, news, and station breaks. Intro, re-intro, lead-in and lead-out takes another minute or two. If you're a BBC news presenter, trained to speak at 120 words per minute, we're looking at the equivalent of a 3800 word article. Nobody reaches this speed in an interview.

That being said, I'd love to see Friedman address these points in a forum where he has the time.

Going Wobbly

One reason I've never been able to warm up to Stratfor is the persistent gloominess and despondency it exudes. George Friedman and his mopy men must have published an optimistic analysis of some world event somewhere, somewhen; but danged if I can recollect any. For the most part, any Stratfor paper can be reduced to the following abstract: Doom is nigh!

Victory is never an option

Lately, however, the entire organization appears to be in utter despair. Take today; Friedman was a guest on Dennis Prager's radio show, and he made the following points:

1. We cannot possibly stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons; it's inevitable.
2. Even without nukes, Iran's conventional forces mean it can dominate the entire Middle East at will.
3. If we were even to try to take out Iran's nuclear sites, it would mine the entire Strait of Hormuz; this would stop 25% of the world's oil market from flowing, which would raise oil prices beyond $400 or $500 a barrel... which would utterly destroy all Western economies, including our own.
4. There is nothing Israel can do in response to a Hezbollah chemical attack except hunker down and hope that some of Israel's population survives. Hezbollah probably cannot kill every Israel; some would surely remain.

From these "realistic" (that is, terminally pessimistic) assessments and analyses, Friedman made the following recommendation, near as I can recall. This is of course my own phrasing, not Friedman's; but I believe it amounts to a reasonably fair summary of what it appeared to me Friedman proposed:

Since the United States is pulling out its troops, we have no power at all in the Middle East anymore. Israel cannot help us, and we cannot help Israel. Therefore, the only course of action available to us is to cut a deal with Iran.

Since we have no power to threaten Iran, we'll have to accept whatever terms Iran dictates. We will have to recognize and acknowledge Iran as the ruling player in the Middle East; if we're contrite enough, Iran may allow us to have the oil we need to survive.

As for Israel, it must cut the best deal it can with Hezbollah and hope that some Israelis will be allowed to depart in peace. America's moment is passed; the Young Turks (and Persians) will be the new masters of the world.

Friedman went on to predict, following a second question from Prager, that the European Union was fated to shatter apart. Most of Europe will sink into the State of Nature described in Hobbes' Leviathan, where those few remaining lead lives that are "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." However, some countries will do very well: Germany will probably prosper; but the biggest winner will be Russia, which will end up ruling all of Europe, eastern and western.

We must cut a deal with the Russian bear as well. But see, at least we get a choice: America can become a client state of either Russia or Iran!

Needless to say, I find such despair mongering less than convincing. I note that George Friedman left a number of circumstances out of his calculations.

Iran's deathgrip on the world's oil supply

First, he never once mentioned the staggering oil wealth we ourselves have, right here in our own backyard. Besides the Gulf of Mexico, the Santa Barbara coast, and ANWR -- which by itself comprises nearly as much oil as in all of Iran, and not counting the 20 billion barrels of oil (bbl) we already have at our disposal (should we ever choose to dispose of them) -- we also have something in great abundance that most members of OPEC have scantily or completely lack: oil-shale deposits.

The four largest oil-shale reserves are in the United States; combined, they're the equivalent of more than two trillion bbl. By way of comparison, the combined liquid oil reserves of Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, the UAE, Venezuela, Russia, Libya, Nigeria, Qatar, Algeria, Brazil, and Mexico are less than 1.2 trillion bbl.

So a better way to phrase Friedman's point 3 above is that, if we take out Iran's nukes, then inexplicably allow them to mine the Strait of Hormuz without a fight, we would be forced to begin drilling in our own vast territory -- and selling oil to our allies, who could no longer travel to the Persian Gulf. (Of course, that means we would get those trillions of petrodollars, instead of Iran; what a shame!) And if the price indeed rose sufficiently, it would spur us to begin extracting oil from shale, inventing whatever techniques are necessary to make it practical and profitable.

Not to mention giving us a real incentive to develop high-temperature ceramic engines to burn gasoline much more efficiently, something I've been writing about since the halcyon days at Patterico's Pomposifications, half a decade ago.

Then there's coal liquifaction, nuclear fission, solar-power satellites, and many other energy sources that don't require us to kow-tow to our enemies, begging them to supply us with oil. The current system is untenable anyway: Why entrust our entire economy to countries that would as soon see us dead as the proverbial clam?

Instead of using our energy fragility as an excuse for doing nothing in the face of threats and provocations, murders of our troops and aiding and abetting our enemies... why not use our weakness as a spur towards complete energy self-sufficiency? That's the American way of responding to an impossible situation: change the rules of the game to allow us to win!

Rather than being a deal killer, Iran's threat can turn out to be an utter game changer... pushing the United States to a much stronger position of world leadership even than we enjoy today. It's not a setback, it's a challenge.

Military muscle

Likewise, Friedman's burbling threnody of despair assumes that if Iran decides to mine the Strait, there's nothing we can do about it. If we try to attack Iran's missile and nuclear sites, we'll fail. If Hezbollah shoots Scuds with chemical warheads at Israel, the Jewish state can only cower in the dark and wait for Armageddon.

He seems to have little faith in American, Israeli, and in general Western fighting spirit. I have greater.

Some years ago, I discussed a military strategy for use against Iran that I dubbed the Herman Option, after historian Arthur Herman, who wrote about it. Here is an extensive excerpt from that 2007 post...

Take a moment to look at this map of the Persian Gulf:

Iran: Persian Gulf and Strait of Hormuz

The narrow pinch of the Strait of Hormuz on the far right of the Gulf -- about 20 miles wide, with two 1-mile wide sea lanes for tanker traffic -- controls delivery of about a quarter of the entire world's daily oil production. It is staggeringly important to the entire world.

The biggest fear about Iran is that, in response to an attack on their nuclear development sites, they might strike back with a catastrophic terrorist attack in the strait: Iran, Hezbollah, or both could attack an oil supertanker at the narrowest part of the strait, sinking the huge ship and sealing the passage for perhaps years... and as a serendipitous side effect, causing the worst environmental disaster in human history (I'm sure the Iranian mullahs lose sleep over that one).

There is reason to fear this option: the Iranians themselves have practically boasted about it. In Arthur Herman's Commentary piece linked above, he notes this quite matter of factly:

In April of this year, as if to drive the point home, Iranian armed forces staged elaborate war games in the Gulf, test-firing a series of new anti-ship missiles capable of devastating any tanker or unwary warship. In the boast of one Iranian admiral, April's "Holy Prophet war games" showed what could be expected by anyone daring to violate Iran's interests in the Gulf. A further demonstration of resolve occurred in August, when Iran fired on and then occupied a Rumanian-owned oil platform ostensibly in a dispute over ownership rights; in truth, the action was intended to show Western companies—including Halliburton, which had won a contract for constructing facilities in the Gulf—exactly which power is in charge there.

A 30-page document said to issue from the Strategic Studies Center of the Iranian Navy (NDAJA), and drawn up in September or October of last year, features a contingency plan for closing the Hormuz Straits through a combination of anti-ship missiles, coastal artillery, and submarine attacks. The plan calls for the use of Chinese-made mines, Chinese-built missile boats, and more than 1,000 explosive-packed suicide motor boats to decimate any U.S. invasion force before it can so much as enter the Gulf. Iran's missile units, manned by the regime's Revolutionary Guards, would be under instruction to take out more than 100 targets around the Gulf rim, including Saudi production and export centers.

As Herman notes, "contingency" plans are just that, and may never come to fruition; but clearly, Iran is thinking along these lines. And why not? How could they more seriously hurt the West than to shut off the black gold (Teheran tea) that we depend upon? (I'm sure the mullahs have followed with great glee the GOP's bootless efforts to open up a teensy-tiny fraction of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) to clean, modern oil extraction... along with the Gulf of Mexico and the California coast; the efforts were of course thwarted by the then-minority Democrats, who were rewarded for their intransigence by being voted into the majority.)

But on the other hand, as the saying goes, "a plan betrayed is a plan denied." The Persian Gulf is a two-edged scimitar. Herman again:

Every country in Western Europe and Asia, including those that complain most bitterly about American policy in the Middle East, depends on the steady maintenance of the global economic order that runs on Middle Eastern oil.

But -- and herein lies a fruitful irony -- so does Iran itself. Almost 90 percent of the mullahs' oil assets are located either in or near the Gulf. So is the nuclear reactor that Russia is building for Iran at Bushehr. Virtually every Iranian well or production platform depends on access to the Gulf if Iran's oil is to reach buyers. Hence, the same Straits by means of which Iran intends to lever itself into a position of global power present the West with its own point of leverage to reduce Iran's power -- and to keep it reduced for at least as long as the country's political institutions remain unprepared to enter the modern world.

On a nutshell, Iran thinks of the PG as the lever by which it will move the world; but in reality, to a truly modern nation such as the United States, the Gulf is the lever by which the rest of the world will move Iran.

Herman suggests a seven-point plan to break the logjam with Iran:

1. Announce that we will not tolerate any nation interfering with the flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz;
2. Back that threat up by sending at least a carrier battle group (CBG) to the Persian Gulf, along with anti-submarine ships and planes (the latter are routinely carried on carriers), minesweepers, Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense System-equipped cruisers and destroyers, UAVs, and our own submarines;
3. Declare a one-country blockade of all of Iran's oil shipments out -- and gasonline shipments in; a complete freeze-out. Everyone else gets to ship freely through the strait... just not Iran;
4. Launch a "comprehensive air campaign" against Iran's air defenses, air bases, communications grid, and missile sites along the PG;
5. Continue the campaign against the nuclear sites and all supporting infrastructure, including roads, bridges, power plants that serve the nuclear development centers at Natanz and Bushehr, and so forth;
6. Finally, and most important, continue the campaign to take out all of Iran's gasoline refineries.

Herman points out the critical choke-point for Iran and the focus of this campaign:

It is still insufficiently appreciated that Iran, a huge oil exporter, imports nearly 40 percent of its gasoline from foreign sources, including the Gulf states. With its refineries gone and its storage facilities destroyed, Iran's cars, trucks, buses, planes, tanks, and other military hardware would run dry in a matter of weeks or even days. This alone would render impossible any major countermoves by the Iranian army. (For its part, the Iranian navy is aging and decrepit, and its biggest asset, three Russian-made Kilo-class submarines, should and could be destroyed before leaving port.)

Contingent upon the completetion of the first six steps, Herman suggests the coup de grâce:

7. American special forces would seize all of Iran's offshore wells and pumping stations, from the strait to Kharg Island (the small, unmarked island just off Iran's coast, due east of Kuwait and about 10 o'clock from Bushehr).

Herman concludes that if we did all this, we would able "to control the flow of Iranian oil at the flick of a switch."

While it's clear Iran threatens to mine the Strait if we attack, it's by no means a sure bet that it will succeed; in fact, we have a very good counterstrategy at our fingerends, the Herman Option. In addition, Iran would be cutting its own throat -- which means the very threat itself may be nothing more than a monumental bluff.

There is yet another George Friedman dog in the night that doesn't bark. When discussing Hezbollah and its chemical-tipped Scuds, why did he never even mention the possibility of missile defense? For heaven's sake, has anyone thought that it might possibly have occurred to Israel that Syrian Hezbollah could shoot missiles at them from Lebanese territory?

I strongly suspect that Israel has invested a lot of time and treasure in developing anti-missile systems, particularly for fast, short-distance use -- from Lebanon to Tel Aviv, for example. What logic in assuming that all or even most of the missiles will successfully strike their targets?

But beyond missile defense, would Syria really risk such an aggressive move into all-out, existential war, knowing that in such a dire circumstance, Israel would not make any distinction whatsoever between Hezbollah terrorist targets in Lebanon -- and Syrian military, C³I, and political targets in Damascus?

Deterrence still deters, especially when dealing with a non-jihadist, eminently practical king such as Bashar Assad.

Knowing what is at stake -- that is, what will be at stake, when we have a new Commander in Chief in 2013 -- I believe Iran's and Syria's deeds will not quite live up to their invective. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad talks a great fight.

George Friedman obviously knows all of this; but his interlocutor, Dennis Prager, probably does not, nor does most of Dennis' audience. Shouldn't Friedman have mentioned the positive side of the ledger? Alas, he did not; he limned only the gloomy, pessimistic part of the painting. It's hard not to conclude that he has an agenda... and a good understanding of the whole picture would just get in the way of "the fierce urgency of now."

It all boils down (as oft it doth) not to some technical measure of strength or military might, but rather to our will to fight. And it's exactly that "will to fight" that despairing, defeatist analyses directly attack: If we think we can't win, defeat becomes a self-fulfilling default position.

"Fear is the mind killer."

"Fear is failure and the forerunner of failure."

Fear is a living thing: Feed it, stroke it, heed it, and it grows; starve it and it weakens and dies. Honestly, we need more Petraeuses and a lot fewer George Friedmans; I'm afraid the one of the latter we have plays directly into the hands of our Cowardly Lyin' president.

Expect the exeptional

All this whining and whimpering like whipped dogs is unbecoming the world's only hyperpower. Such despair is not only illogical, not only plays into our enemies' hands, but most important, it's unAmerican. Only those who voluntarily surrender can be ultimately defeated; that is the deepest secret. So long as we stand and fight our fate, Fate is unbound.

Should we go gentle into that bad night? Or should we burn and rave at close of day? If you're an American, there's no need to ask; when the time comes, we'll know what to do. And it will never include signing a suicide pact with Iran to buy us a few more years of subjugation.

"Rage, rage against the dying of the light."

Iran, Obama, and the 1936 reoccupation of the Rhineland

Iran, Obama, and the 1936 reoccupation of the Rhineland

(Fair warning: There is no humor in this post, not even of the snarky sort. I'm not in the mood to sugar-coat my conclusions, or to balance them with hopeful observations.)

Mark Steyn's latest at NRO is characteristically witty, except for its very unfunny thesis paragraph, which is characteristically astute. Given the timetables, and the Obama Administration's commitment to ineffective measures, and its refusal to take the increasingly stiff actions that would be necessary to effect regime change and nonproliferation in Iran, Steyn offers this grim but inescapable conclusion:

It is now certain that Tehran will get its nukes, and very soon. This is the biggest abdication of responsibility by the Western powers since the 1930s. It is far worse than Pakistan going nuclear, which, after all, was just another thing the CIA failed to see coming. In this case, the slow-motion nuclearization conducted in full view and through years of tortuous diplomatic charades and endlessly rescheduled looming deadlines is not just a victory for Iran but a decisive defeat for the United States. It confirms the Islamo-Sino-Russo-everybody-else diagnosis of Washington as a hollow superpower that no longer has the will or sense of purpose to enforce the global order.

I'm genuinely not sure that Obama would know, if he read that paragraph, to which 1930s events Steyn was alluding. For someone with degrees from such distinguished institutions, his knowledge of recent history is surprisingly spotty. He might or might not turn to his staff for an explanation, and if so, someone probably would have mentioned the appeasement of Hitler at Munich in September 1938 or (less aptly) the German invasion of Poland in September 1939.

That's yet not where we are in the comparison, though. The history being replayed today is that of March 7, 1936 — when Hitler and the Nazis remilitarized the Rhineland. And I've seen no indication whatsoever that our President's knowledge of 20th Century history includes a knowledge of that particular turning point of history.

Hitler's remilitarization of the Rhineland — in outright defiance of the Versailles and Locarno Treaties — was when the West had its last, best clear chance to stop Hitler and the Nazis, with the likely toppling of Hitler's government as a consequence, at a trivial military expense. All that was necessary was that France and Great Britain (chiefly the former, as the relevant neighbor) just barely flex their vastly superior military muscles — which, given Nazi treaty violations, they had an indisputable legal right to do. Indeed, the Germans were instructed to reverse course and retreat at even a display of military purpose and intent to oppose them on the part of the French. Instead, because France and Britain acquiesced in the treaty violations, Hitler promptly accelerated the conversion of his illegally reconstituted military into the fierce machine that brought us the Blitzkreig and subsequent Nazi occupation or domination of Europe.

In 2003, America and the rest of the world believed that Saddam was about to get nukes. We talked about "WMDs" to include chemical and biological weapons, both of which Iraq had already acquired and used. But the invasion and regime-change of Iraq was perceived by those of narrow insight to be almost exclusively about the nukes. What shocked most Americans the most was that the nukes weren't there. What shocked much of the rest of the world, including nuclear wannabe countries like Iran and Libya, the most was that the still-respected Iraqi army — one that had fought the Iranians to a bloody standstill in their 1980-1988 war, and that had at least survived the Gulf War — proceeded to fold like a house of cards in a hurricane under the American-British assault. Libya was scared straight as a direct and near immediate result, but Iran has, of course, continued to play provocateur — doing its best to make things difficult for us and the Iraqis while fast-tracking their own nuclear acquisition efforts.

(Me, I was one of those hawk troglodytes who still held that Saddam's near daily attempts to shoot down our pilots in the No-Fly Zone was ample reason enough to drive American tanks into the middle of Baghdad if that's what it took to knock his regime out of power. And for the last several years of this decade, I've been one of those troglodyte hawks who has the exact same reaction to Iran furnishing men, materiel (including IEDs), and support for the killing of American troops in Iraq. We have long had more than sufficient justification for whatever steps are required to change the regime in Tehran.)

Barack Obama and Joe Biden, among many other reckless and irresponsible Democrats, did their dead-level best to sabotage our continuing efforts in Iraq from 2003 onward. (Indeed, Biden's efforts go back to his opposition to the Gulf War, long before Obama was on anyone's radar.) In their and their Party's revised Democratic-orthodoxy of world history, the Iraq invasion to stop nuclear nonproliferation was the result of a deliberate lie by Bush. With Obama and Biden and Hillary at the helm, and with gutless lickspittles like Reid and Pelosi running Congress, there is no longer any serious fear on the part of America's potential and actual enemies (Iran is definitely in the latter camp) that there will be any similar American military intervention to prevent nuclear nonproliferation anywhere.

And so here we are in 2010, in the predicament Steyn has pinpointed. Iran will get its bomb before the reins of leadership in America can possibly be passed back to someone who could summon up the nation's will to stop that process, and by then the costs of restoring Iran to a non-nuclear status will have grown unfathomably greater.

Although the costs will be unfathomably greater, that does not make me think they are less likely ultimately to have to be paid anyway. I think exactly the opposite is true: Something awful is going to happen, something so bad that it does, in an instant, shock the United States out of its narcolepsy in the same manner that 12/7/41 and 9/11/01 did. Recall, again, that in the Iraq-Iran War, Iran sent battalion after battalion of teen-aged volunteers, some without even rifles, in human-wave assaults on Iraqi minefields and fixed defenses. The mullahs didn't hesitate to slaughter many tens of thousands of their teenage children when they lacked even a fraction of a chance of military success. We cannot expect them to "grow" and "mature" when they have the responsibilities of a nuclear power. We cannot expect them to be rational at all because they have a demonstrated history of irrationality and they are in the grips of an ideology that can be twisted to justify even the most extreme apocalyptic acts.

Barack Obama's feckless vacuum of an Iranian foreign policy will almost certainly lead directly to nuclear slaughter, and quite probably a slaughter of Israelis, Europeans, and yes, Americans. The ghosts of not just Chamberlain, but of Quisling and Arnold, will surely rejoice, for after he has let the Iranians get their Bomb, the name "Obama" will forever eclipse theirs as appeasers and traitors to their duty.

("Bush-43 didn't fix this during his term," my progressive friends will retort, and "What exactly would you have Obama do?" Well, friends, Bush bestirred the country sufficiently to depose the Taliban in Afghanistan and Saddam in Iraq, and to give each of those countries a democracy if they can keep it (with considerable investment of American blood and treasure toward those ends too). If American foreign policy were genuinely bipartisan and clear-eyed, instead of being methodically manipulated, month after month and year after year, for the most crass political purposes by Democrats, then we would not be nearly so war-weary, and we might instead be in the process of doing to Iran what JFK did to Cuba in October 1962: Enforcing a nuclear quarantine. Slow, strangling sanctions are a horrible idea; swift and aggressive ones, like blockading all gasoline imports and disabling Iran's own crucial but limited refinery capacity to suddenly paralyze their entire economy, will indeed hurt the Iranian people more than it hurts their corrupt and crazy leadership. But a sanction that is insufficient to prompt them to shake off their current government is, by definition, an inadequate sanction. (But cf. John Bolton's August 2009 WSJ op-ed; I'm proposing not merely the typical UN-debated import restrictions, but what would indeed be, and should be confidently and unrepentantly confirmed as, responding to Iran's repeated acts of war with our own acts that are indeed warfare.) There's no shortage, in fact, of things we can do, even though with each passing day there are fewer things that can be done at comparatively low risk. But there's no point in our arguing over the costs, risks, and rewards of potential measures. They're all moot, given the absence of a leader in the White House who will act instead of dither and self-justify.)

Probably apocryphal, but...

From Cheat-Seeking Missiles:

According to a Marine Pilot:

In addition to communicating with the local Air Traffic Control facility, all aircraft in the Persian Gulf AOR are required to give the Iranian Air Defense Radar (military) a ten minute 'heads up' if they will be transiting Iranian airspace.

This is a common procedure for commercial aircraft and involves giving them your call sign, transponder code, type aircraft, and points of origin and destination.

I just flew with a guy who overheard this conversation on the VHF Guard (emergency) frequency 121.5 MHz while flying from Europe to Dubai. It's too good not to pass along. The conversation went something like this…

Iranian Air Defense Radar: 'Unknown aircraft at (location unknown), you are in Iranian airspace. Identify yourself.'

Aircraft: 'This is a United States aircraft. I am in Iraqi airspace.'

Air Defense Radar: ' You are in Iranian airspace. If you do not depart our airspace we will launch interceptor aircraft!'

Aircraft: 'This is a United States Marine Corps FA-18 fighter. Send 'em up, I'll wait!'

Air Defense Radar: (no response … total silence)

The Flaws In the Iran Report

John Bolton has some words about the NIE:

Rarely has a document from the supposedly hidden world of intelligence had such an impact as the National Intelligence Estimate released this week. Rarely has an administration been so unprepared for such an event. And rarely have vehement critics of the "intelligence community" on issues such as Iraq's weapons of mass destruction reversed themselves so quickly.

All this shows that we not only have a problem interpreting what the mullahs in Tehran are up to, but also a more fundamental problem: Too much of the intelligence community is engaging in policy formulation rather than "intelligence" analysis, and too many in Congress and the media are happy about it. President Bush may not be able to repair his Iran policy (which was not rigorous enough to begin with) in his last year, but he would leave a lasting legacy by returning the intelligence world to its proper function.

Consider these flaws in the NIE's "key judgments," which were made public even though approximately 140 pages of analysis, and reams of underlying intelligence, remain classified.

First, the headline finding -- that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 -- is written in a way that guarantees the totality of the conclusions will be misread. In fact, there is little substantive difference between the conclusions of the 2005 NIE on Iran's nuclear capabilities and the 2007 NIE. Moreover, the distinction between "military" and "civilian" programs is highly artificial, since the enrichment of uranium, which all agree Iran is continuing, is critical to civilian and military uses. Indeed, it has always been Iran's "civilian" program that posed the main risk of a nuclear "breakout."

The real differences between the NIEs are not in the hard data but in the psychological assessment of the mullahs' motives and objectives. The current NIE freely admits to having only moderate confidence that the suspension continues and says that there are significant gaps in our intelligence and that our analysts dissent from their initial judgment on suspension. This alone should give us considerable pause.

Second, the NIE is internally contradictory and insufficiently supported. It implies that Iran is susceptible to diplomatic persuasion and pressure, yet the only event in 2003 that might have affected Iran was our invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, not exactly a diplomatic pas de deux. As undersecretary of state for arms control in 2003, I know we were nowhere near exerting any significant diplomatic pressure on Iran. Nowhere does the NIE explain its logic on this critical point. Moreover, the risks and returns of pursuing a diplomatic strategy are policy calculations, not intelligence judgments. The very public rollout in the NIE of a diplomatic strategy exposes the biases at work behind the Potemkin village of "intelligence."

That such a flawed product could emerge after a drawn-out bureaucratic struggle is extremely troubling. While the president and others argue that we need to maintain pressure on Iran, this "intelligence" torpedo has all but sunk those efforts, inadequate as they were. Ironically, the NIE opens the way for Iran to achieve its military nuclear ambitions in an essentially unmolested fashion, to the detriment of us all.

Well, the President of Iran did declare it a major victory.

Does anyone take the NIE at face value?

Conservative have good reason to be suspicious of the liberals in the intelligence community who have been desperately trying to avoid responsibility for their Iraq estimates. Rowan Scarborough recently published a book called Sabotage, America's Enemies Within the CIA which suggest that the CIA has become a rogue agency. I am not sure that is the case here. As I point out in my earlier post, the 2005 estimate which suggested the program was still active was based on finding a notebook computer containing plans for an Iranian bomb. I still think the real situation with Iran is that they are biding their time and waiting for us to retreat before going forward with their plans. The Democrats appear to be playing into their strategy.

Going wrong with confidence

Robert Heinlein once defined logic as "a way of going wrong with confidence." Today's Wall Street Journal looks at a a conclusion one reaches upon comparing the latest NIE with past ones -- a conclusion that seems, well, logical.

As recently as 2005, the consensus estimate of our spooks was that "Iran currently is determined to develop nuclear weapons" and do so "despite its international obligations and international pressure." This was a "high confidence" judgment. The new NIE says Iran abandoned its nuclear program in 2003 "in response to increasing international scrutiny." This too is a "high confidence" conclusion. One of the two conclusions is wrong, and casts considerable doubt on the entire process by which these "estimates"--the consensus of 16 intelligence bureaucracies--are conducted and accorded gospel status.

Should we trust the latest NIE?

Mark Falcoff is a former professional staff member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and, as he mentions below, senior consultant to the 1983 National Bipartisan Commission on Central America chaired by Henry Kissinger. Among other affiliations, he has been a long-time resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

He offers some comments on this NIE, and on NIEs in general.

The first is that most Americans don't understand that the CIA is pided into two different pisions--estimates and operations. Most Americans, and I suppose most foreigners, imagine that the CIA spends all its time on operations. Actually the vast majority of resources are put into estimates. Mover, the two sides of the house, as they call it, have nothing whatever to do with each other. They are kept completely apart.

The other misconception is that the same kinds of people work on both sides of the house. Wrong again. The operations guys conform pretty much to the stereotype of Hollywood films--ex-military or professional spooks. The estimates guys are mostly academic types who couldn't find a job teaching at a university when they got their Ph.D. Politically and culturally they are absolutely indistinguishable from the career people at the State Department. You can imagine what that means in the present context of Bush-hatred.

My other comment is this. NIE's are not necessary accurate. Sometimes they are wildly inaccurate. I invite anyone to go to "Foreign Relations of the United States: Cuba, 1958-1960" and read what was said about Fidel Castro before he took power. Another example: a week before Somoza collapsed in Nicaragua, the NIE of the day claimed he was bound to remain in power indefinitely. I haven't looked at the NIE for Iran the week before the Shah departed, but I wouldn't be a bit surprised if it said something similar.

Let me add a further note. In 1986 I was working for the Kissinger Commission on Central America and as such I was allowed to see the NIEs on all the relevant countries in the circum-Caribbean. I vividly recall the one on Mexico. Among other things it claimed that the foreign minister of that country was an embittered leftist married to a Soviet citizen. As it happens, I knew the son of the couple (he has since become foreign minister of Mexico in his own right) and I knew for a fact that his mother was not a Soviet citizen. Far from it. She was a nice Jewish lady who lived in New York and grew up in Brooklyn. It is, I suppose, possible that she was brought to the US in the 1920s from the Soviet Union--at age 3. But there is a crucial difference between that and what was in the NIE. The implications for our foreign policy were very different. At the time I wondered, Who checks this things out? I still wonder.

Five questions about the NIE

• First, what intelligence is this assessment based upon?
• Second, what has changed since 2005?
• Third, how did the IC draw its line between a "civilian" nuclear program and a military one?
• Fourth, how does the IC know that Iran has stopped its clandestine activities with respect to developing nuclear weapons?
• Fifth, how does the IC know what motivated Iran’s alleged change in behavior?

The knights who say NIE

While I do agree that the NIE was somewhat less grounded than previous estimates, I don't agree with what is becoming a popular conservative talking point: Iran dropped their program in 2003 because OIF showed the world that America meant business. I think that it's far more likely that the Iranians--if they really did drop their program--had a North Korea (rather than Libya) style epiphany, realizing that the technological hurdle in constructing a bomb, shrinking it, and mating it to an effective delivery system was just too complicated of an endeavor. Had Iran truly been scared into submission by the U.S. invasion of Iraq, I doubt we would have heard four years of blustering about "Iran's right to nuclear research and development" and boasting about "thousands of operational centrifuges."

http://www.weeklystandard.com/weblogs/TWSFP/2007/12/daily_blog_buzz_nie_commentary.asp

Bryan Preston at Hot Air says,

My take is that we're in a state of dangerous uncertainty all around: We can't trust the IAEA, we don't trust the Iranians (both with good reason), but there's just enough doubt in the NIE to keep the B2s grounded and the Iranians on the loose because the Bush administration cannot base an attack or even another round of sanctions on this estimate, not after the intel failures in Iraq.

And what does President Bush have to say? Michelle Malkin live-blogged his press conference:

10:10am Eastern. David Gregory accuses Bush of knowing about the NIE months ago. DG: "Can't you be accused of hyping this threat?"

GWB: "I hate to contradict an august reporter such as yourself, but I was made aware of this NIE last week--Iran was dangerous. Iran is dangerous. And Iran will be dangerous if they have the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon."

http://www.weeklystandard.com/weblogs/TWSFP/2007/12/nie_what_changed_since_2005.asp

Finally, Joe Lieberman's take: http://www.weeklystandard.com/weblogs/TWSFP/2007/12/liberman_on_iran_nie.asp

Annotated Iraq Study Group recommendations

This is a long one.

How likely does it have to be?

Suppose that upon entering Iraq, our troops had uncovered a nuclear facility in which Saddam had 1,000 working centrifuges, another 2,000 about to come on line, and manufacturing capacity to produce yet more centrifuges? Would anyone have argued at that point that the invasion had been unnecessary? Do any Democrats deny that Iran does in fact have all of this capacity right now?

Sailors in Iran

The propaganda war continues.

One of the graphics shows the location of the captured ship. The first location reported by Iran was clearly in Iraqi waters. The subsequent edited data place it in Iranian waters.

Iran's act of war

The editors of NRO ask several experts about the implications of Iran's seizure of 15 British sailors, and what should be done about it.

Nikolas K. Gvosdev, editor of The National Interest:

...there is no cost-free solution. No magic airstrike, no deus ex machine covert operation, no “grand bargain,” no display of Security Council unanimity over anemic sanctions, is going to result in an Iran that gives up its nuclear program, ends support for terrorism, stops its pursuit of regional hegemony and creates conditions for the disappearance of the Islamic Republic

Walid Phares, senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies:

...a multidimensional campaign should be launched, systematically yet gradually, instead of a single retaliation. Along with vigorous diplomatic pressures, the Coalition should formally condemn the regime and call for its isolation. It must create an unbalance of power with Iran via regional deployment while extending an emergency program of support to democracy forces within Iran, including a serious opposition broadcast.

Michael Rubin, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is co-author of Eternal Iran: Continuity and Chaos (Palgrave, 2005):

That Iranian decision makers took such a step is not the result of too little diplomacy, but rather too much. Since Germany launched its critical dialogue with Iran in 1992, European countries have showered the Islamic Republic with apologies and incentives to compromise. Rather than abandon terrorism as a tool of state or reconsider its clandestine nuclear program, the Iranian government has redoubled its efforts to defy. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s May 31, 2006 offer to engage Tehran resulted not in a suspension of uranium enrichment, but rather public gloating by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei about U.S. weakness. Nor did the British “softly-softly” approach toward Tehran or its proxies in Basra bring peace in our time. Rather, it convinced the Revolutionary Guards that the British were targets of least resistance.

....

Tehran has grown accustomed to expect reward for non-compliance. It is time U.S. officials if not their European counterparts recognize failure. Ratcheting up pressure only enables Iranian officials to adjust. True leverage requires comprehensive sanctions which can be lifted in response to changes in Tehran’s behavior. The West should abandon the illusion that factionalism within the Iranian government matters. The Office of the Supreme Leader has exercised remarkable control and coordination over its security apparatus. Presidents, whether pragmatic, reformist, or hardline, may differ in style, but have all operated toward the same goals. The White House should not differentiate between officials, power structures, and proxies and should hold the Iranian government accountable for all its actions.

Saul Singer, editorial-page editor of the Jerusalem Post:

Iran’s kidnapping of British soldiers from Iraqi waters is reminiscent of Hezbollah’s and Hamas’s kidnapping of Israeli soldiers, and of the seizure of the American embassy in Tehran in 1979. This is a regime that does not recognize basic notions of sovereignty and the rules of the game between nation states. Yes, it is an act of war, but this too, to the mullahs, is just another Western nicety to be ignored.

Iran is convinced that the more it plays hardball and breaks rules, the more the West will be intimidated and the safer the regime will be. The West must show this calculation is mistaken by raising the costs of Iranian behavior higher and faster, thereby deterring further Iranian escalation.

Henry Sokolski, executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center.

Once again, Tehran is testing the waters to see just how far it can violate international law, this time by seizing 15 British sailors conducting anti-smuggling patrols in Iraqi territorial waters. The timing of this stunt — on the eve of unanimous passage of yet another United Nations Security Council Iran nuclear-sanctions resolution — suggests that it may have been an attempt to distract or a clumsy effort to intimidate. This much, however, is clear: Supporters of the U.N. and international law must now not only demand that Tehran return the sailors, but comply with the U.N.'s demand to stop exporting arms and making nuclear fuel (an activity that could bring Iran within days of acquiring a bomb). To help assure this result, states should also heed U.S. appeals against lending trade credits to Tehran, investing in its energy sector, or supporting its nuclear and long-range missile programs. Finally, states offering Tehran incentives (including the U.S.) need to insist that before Iran takes advantage of any such offers, it must first dismantle its nuclear fuel-making plants and allow the IAEA to conduct exhaustive wide-area surveillance to make sure Iran is entirely out of the bomb-making business. To attempt anything less only risks emboldening Iran even further.

Iraq, Iran, and Intelligence

The New York Times laments that America is "bullying" Iran.

....

So why the suspicion? The answer seems to be that because intelligence erred in its judgment that Saddam Hussein's regime had weapons of mass destruction it could be erring here, too: All intelligence that could be used to justify military action is inherently dubious.

But the conclusion of our intelligence community -- and that of every other nation with serious intelligence capacity -- that Saddam had WMD was eminently justifiable. Saddam had possessed and used WMD in the past; he had resisted and evaded WMD inspections; and, as we have learned from Charles Duelfer, he retained the capacity to produce WMD in the future.

We found in 1991 that his nuclear program was further along than our intelligence agencies thought. No responsible American leader could have given Saddam the presumption of innocence and assumed he had no WMD until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. George W. Bush didn't. Neither did Bill Clinton.

The Bush critics' position is that we must believe without reservation or criticism any intelligence that can be used to argue against military action and that we should never believe any intelligence, however plausible, that can be used to argue for it. That's not very intelligent.

Iran to get nukes

Iran will be able to develop enough weapons-grade material for a nuclear bomb and there is little that can be done to prevent it, an internal European Union document has concluded.

In an admission of the international community's failure to hold back Iran's nuclear ambitions, the document – compiled by the staff of Javier Solana, EU foreign policy chief – says the atomic programme has been delayed only by technical limitations rather than diplomatic pressure. "Attempts to engage the Iranian administration in a negotiating process have not so far succeeded," it states.

The downbeat conclusions of the "reflection paper" – seen by the Financial Times – are certain to be seized on by advocates of military action, who fear that Iran will be able to produce enough fissile material for a bomb over the next two to three years. Tehran insists its purposes are purely peaceful.

Iran

The Washington Times has an article headlined, "A-bomb intent found in black-market paper".

VIENNA, Austria -- A document obtained by Iran on the nuclear black market serves no other purpose than to make an atomic bomb, the International Atomic Energy Agency said yesterday.

Sounds bad. Sounds threatening, even if it's not quite an "imminent" threat.

I'd love to see the folks who've been the loudest opponents of the Iraq war forced to go on the record with answers to some questions. These questions include:

• Do you believe Iran is attempting to build nuclear weapons?
• Do you believe Iran intends to use any nuclear weapons it builds or obtains?
• Do you believe the possibility of Iranian nuclear weapons is just grounds for an invasion of Iran?
• What steps do you believe the US should take to address possible Iranian nukes?
• How long should we give any steps short of an invasion to "work", and what will "working" be defined as?
• Whose blessing would any country need for its invasion of Iran to be "legal"?

Inquiring minds want to know.

A third option

Jonah Goldberg sees a third possibility for Iran: regime change from within.

Wheels turning on the axis of evil

In his State of the Union speech after the September 11 attack, George Bush defined an "axis of evil" comprised of (at least) Iran, Iraq, and North Korea.

Charles Krauthammer looks at Iran's behavior and thinks the wheels may be turning around at least one part of the axis. Iran is playing with (nuclear) fire.

The Iranians had broken the seals on their nuclear facilities and were resuming activity in defiance of their pledges to the "E.U. Three." This negotiating exercise, designed as an alternative to the U.S. approach of imposing sanctions on Iran for its violations of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, had proved entirely futile. If anything, the two-year hiatus gave Iran time to harden its nuclear facilities against bombardment, acquire new antiaircraft capacities and clandestinely advance its program.

An Israeli bombing strike probably won't be enough to shut down any Iranian program.

In a previous article, Krauthammer looks at who's running Iran.

Everyone knows where Iran's nuclear weapons will be aimed. Everyone knows they will be put on Shahab rockets, which have been modified so that they can reach Israel. And everyone knows that if the button is ever pushed, it will be the end of Israel. But it gets worse. The president of a country about to go nuclear is a confirmed believer in the coming apocalypse.

Krauthammer sees two choices: a military strike, or more of the same.

Heavy water in Iran

(Hat tip: Brown and Caldwell California Water News)

Iran has unveiled a heavy water plant, capable of producing 8 tons of heavy water each year. In five months, it's expected to double its output.

Heavy water is water with heavy hydrogen (deuterium) instead of normal run-of-the-mill hydrogen. Light water is H₂O; heavy water is light water enriched with additional DHO (one hydrogen atom, one deuterium atom) and D₂O.

Deuterium weighs very close to twice what hydrogen weighs, and each deuterium atom in an average molecule of heavy water increases its mass by about one atomic mass unit. (Up to a maximum of two, if every molecule contains two deuterium atoms to one oxygen atom.)

A small fraction of all water has at least one deuterium atom in place of one of its hydrogen atoms. These can be concentrated by various methods. Indeed, certain bodies of water, like the Dead Sea, have naturally high concentrations of heavy water, because heavy water evaporates a little more slowly than light water does. Over the centuries, the heavy water has noplace else to go, so it piles up. (Actually, it reaches an equilibrium concentration because it does evaporate.)

The increase of mass doesn't seem like a whole lot. DHO has an atomic mass of 19 5.5% heavier than H₂O's atomic mass of 18. D₂O is 11% heavier than H₂O.

5.5% and 11% heavier doesn't seem like that big a deal, except that increase in weight happens to be right where all the action is.

In a nuclear reactor, you have two essential components: nuclear fuel, and a moderator. Other components that are extremely nice include control rods and a cooling system.

In order to get a nuclear reactor going, you need some of the atoms in your fuel to split and emit neutrons, and you need enough of those neutrons to be captured by other atoms of fuel, causing further splitting and generating further neutrons, to keep the reaction going.

That brings up the notion of the "interaction cross section". Neutrons moving through fuel are like bullets flying through a collection of targets. If you blindfold a marksman (marks-person?) and let him shoot in random directions in a room full of targets, there's a small chance he'll hit a target. If the targets are made bigger, the odds go up. Being bigger, each target has a larger interaction cross section.

The thing about nuclear reactions is the interaction cross section varies with the speed of the oncoming particle. It's as if the marksman's targets grew or shrank depending on the muzzle velocity of his gun.

Natural uranium is mostly U-238 with a small fraction of U-235. U-235 has a very large cross section for slow neutrons, and it can be burned in a light water reactor very easily. In a light water reactor, the fuel is surrounded by light water. Neutrons speeding out into the water are pretty likely to run into a molecule of the water. If they hit a hydrogen atom, they will be slowed down quite a lot, and may even come to a screeching halt. Since neutrons are only slightly heavier than the nucleus of hydrogen atoms, they bounce off each other like pool balls on a pool table. If one ball hits another dead on, the first ball comes to a stop and the other ball goes speeding off with all the energy. The water acts as a "moderator", slowing fast neutrons down so they can be absorbed by the U-235 and cause them to split.

U-238 has a relatively small cross section for slow neutrons. Its cross section is much higher for fast neutrons. Therefore, you don't want to slow neutrons down if you want to burn U-238. You want some material that will reflect neutrons back into the fuel without slowing them down.

Going back to the analogy of balls crashing into each other, let's look at what happens when the masses are unequal. Suppose we replace our cue ball with one that's half the mass. It turns out that even if we hit another ball dead on, we can never get it to come to a dead stop. It will transfer, at most, two thirds of its momentum to the other ball, and thus keep a lot of its own speed. The result is, neutrons speeding through heavy water take a longer time to slow down, and thus spend more time at a speed where they are likely to hit the U-238 targets.

Heavy water thus makes it possible to burn natural uranium in a reactor without going through the work of enriching it. (And enriching water to make heavy water is much safer to deal with than enriching uranium. Uranium is radioactive, and in order to process it, you have to react it with some very reactive chemicals.

The main problem with an Iranian heavy water program is that a nuclear reactor that burns natural uranium can also produce other byproducts. Not all neutrons will cause uranium atoms to split. Some of them will be absorbed by uranium atoms without causing a fission. If the resulting U-239 declines to split, it will decay (with a half-life of less than 24 minutes) into Neptunium 239. Neptunium then decays (with a half-life of some two and a half days) into Plutonium 239.

Pu-239 has a half-life of 24,390 years, so it will build up in a reactor for as long as you care to run it. It will capture neutrons and split very readily, so you have to balance various factors to keep the stuff around, but it's certainly doable.

In order to get large quantities of "weapons grade" uranium, you need to do a lot of work to separate isotopes. In order to get "weapons grade" plutonium out of used nuclear fuel, you only need to do a chemical separation. That's a lot easier.

That's why people are worried about Iranian heavy water production.

Now, the Iranian government says it will use its nuclear technology for peaceful ends. Given their track record, I think it's reasonable to have doubts about that.