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In Senate hearings Tuesday on major threats to US security, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard voiced a very long and fundamentally shameful oxymoron.
Specifically: While “Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile” has hit “unprecedented” levels for a state lacking nuclear weapons, the US intel community overall “continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon” and that “Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003.”
Huh?
At first blush this reads like semantic gameplaying: An ambitious would-be hegemon like Iran jacks up its supply of enriched uranium for only one reason.
Heck, even President Barack Obama — the best friend Tehran ever had — premised his disastrous 2016 deal with the mullahs on the idea that they wanted nukes.
But the official IC denialism goes all the way back to the George W. Bush administration, which in 2007 declassified its National Intelligence Assessment on Iran to reveal that its spooks were not sure Iran (despite all appearances) was actually trying to build a nuclear weapon.
And it continued under Obama, too, with an update to that Bush-era NIA saying the same thing.
James Clapper, then DNI, testified as such in Congress (that alone should make any sane person doubt it).
Fine, it’s not impossible that a country would head-fake with pointless stockpile buildups to bluff being well on its way to becoming a nuclear power, but that’s not what’s happening here.
Iran wants nukes for a host of reasons, including to bolster its drive toward regional hegemony and to make the regime that much harder to dislodge.
And as the world has seen, it’s willing to put its economy through the sanctions meatgrinder to get them — hard to imagine better proof of sincerity.
For reasons of its own, the US intel community refuses to admit the obvious, but why is Gabbard playing mouthpiece for that denial?
The point of making her DNI is that, as a crusading outsider-reformer, she would break the hold the “deep state” has over our intelligence agencies.
Yet here she’s repeating the establishment “assessment” that seems far more based on wishes and hopes than glaring realities.
Why does she think her boss, President Donald Trump, has made a point of saying Iran “cannot have a nuclear weapon”?
Has she (or her IC minions) even reviewed the Israeli intelligence on Iran’s nuclear programs?
The president will devise his own strategy to deal with Tehran; it may be aggressive (like his first-term posture, as it should be) or more conciliatory.
Either way, it’s time to permanently retire this IC fantasy about Tehran’s intentions.
