Here are two reports of doubts re Iran’s nuclear program (thanks to Dan Sisken). First, in the Times online, Israeli general Brigadier-General Uzi Eilam says that Iran is not a nuclear threat:
A general who was once in charge of Israel’s nuclear weapons has claimed that Iran is a “very, very, very long way from building a nuclear capability”.
Brigadier-General Uzi Eilam, 75, a war hero and pillar of the defence establishment, believes it will probably take Iran seven years to make nuclear weapons.
And here is an American general and chief of Pentagon intelligence saying that "Iran [is] Not Committed to Building Nuclear Bomb", in an article that suggests that the Obama administration is getting ready to up the intelligence ante visavis Iran:
"The bottom line assessments of the [National Intelligence Estimate in 2007] still hold true," [Lt.General Ronald] Burgess [chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency] said. "We have not seen indication that the government has made the decision to move ahead with the program. But the fact still remains that we don’t know what we don’t know."
As there was with Iraq, there is a highly organized movement afoot to pretend that none of this matters, that “the mullahs” have always intended to get their hands on a nuke, and that we should therefore prepare to
bomb the hell out of Irando what is necessary. We’ve already seen the beginning of an effort by some neocons to resurrect a “Team B” approach to hype the threat of Islamic extremism, ignoring the fact that such an approach, in all of its previous incarnations, generated nothing but staggeringly wrong conclusions about enemy capabilities, resulting is disastrously counterproductive policies.
