Israel Update for December 2007

David Dolan

Israel was strongly impacted during December by two very different occurrences in the distant United States of America, whose President is due to visit here during January. First was the late November international peace parlay that took place over two days in Annapolis, Maryland, just north of Washington DC. As expected, it led to the resumption of formal Israeli-Palestinians peace negotiations in Jerusalem during the month, which quickly proved to be acrimonious at best. It also resulted in the Palestinian Authority receiving international financial pledges of over seven billion US dollars. Several Israeli politicians called for an immediate halt to the talks following a terror attack late in the month that left two young Israeli men dead.

The second-and undoubtedly far more important occurrence in terms of Israel's immediate and long term stability, and even future survival-was the early December release of an American intelligence assessment that maintained "with high confidence" that Iran is no longer attempting to produce destructive nuclear weapons. The shocking appraisal was immediately and roundly rebuffed by senior Israeli government and security officials, including Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and President Shimon Peres.

While on the surface the two issues seemed only vaguely related, many Israeli analysts said the prospects of a successful outcome for the White House regenerated peace process were significantly reduced by the startling American intelligence report. This was due to the widely held evaluation that the extremist Iranian police state regime, entrenched for almost three decades in Tehran, will now feel massively emboldened to rush full throttle ahead toward becoming a nuclear power, with little prospect for either American or Israeli military action to halt its hurtling atomic train. This in turn will significantly strengthen the resolve of Iranian leaders and their regional allies Syria, Hizbullah, Hamas and even Al Qaeda, to escalate their jihad war to annihilate the detested Jewish State. Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni warned in late December that the American report may even help propel pro-Western Arab gulf countries like Qatar and Kuwait to move into Iran's rising strategic orbit.

Blown Away

The assessment by 16 America security agencies, including the CIA and Army Intelligence, that Iran had a clandestine nuclear weapons program, but halted it in 2003, was drawn up in recent months and published on December 2. Security analysts and media pundits around the globe quickly opined that the report effectively thwarted White House and Pentagon plans to potentially launch a major military operation to set back or destroy Iran's nuclear program sometime before President George W. Bush is due to leave office in January 2009. However, it remains to be seen whether the surprise intelligence guesstimate will also scuttle similar plans in nearby Israel that are generally assumed to be in the final stages of preparation.

Preliminary notes to the "National Intelligence Estimate" (NIE) stated that it assessed both the "current status" and "likely direction" of Iran's nuclear program over the next ten years. It added without elaboration that the joint evaluation was an "extensive reexamination" of a previous NIE assessment issued in 2005 which concluded "with high confidence that Iran is determined to develop nuclear weapons despite international obligations and pressure."

In further preliminary notes, the report's authors-members of the "National Intelligence Council" established under Richard Nixon during the waning days of the controversial Viet Nam War in 1973-admit that their assessment is only that: An informed guess as to what Iran might actually be doing, or planning to do, on the nuclear stage, as opposed to the publication of proven facts concerning this crucial issue.

"We use phrases such as we judge, we assess and we estimate to convey analytical assessments and judgments. Such statements are not facts, proofs or knowledge. These assessments and judgments generally are based on collected information, which often is incomplete or fragmentary."

The intriguing notes then chillingly admit that even a "high confidence" judgment, as issued in the latest NIE report about Iran's nuclear weapons program and ambitions, is "not a fact or a certainty," and indeed "carries the risk of being wrong." One need only note that the exact same phrase, "high confidence," was used in the 2005 report stating that Iran was still carrying on with a clandestine nuclear weapons program!

And so, due to a nonfactual and unprovable (and many say highly political) US security intelligence "high confidence judgment" based on admittedly "incomplete or fragmentary" information that may well be entirely off the mark, America's current Commander in Chief, along with his Israeli counterpart, probably now feel that their hands are tied against ordering any military action to prevent the dangerous Shiite rogue state of Iran from building and using the ultimate Weapon of Mass Destruction.

Both George Bush and Ehud Olmert are seemingly corralled despite the provable fact that Iran is the chief sponsor of Hizbullah, a Lebanese Muslim group that carried out massive bombardments of Israeli cities in 2006, and a major supporter of the extremist Palestinian Hamas movement that violently took over the Gaza Strip last June. Plus there are those bothersome known facts that the ruling ayatollah's and their minions are behind the smuggling of weapons into Iraq used to kill US and British forces stationed there; that they publicly vow to destroy Israel in the near future; and that they openly boast they are enriching uranium in defiance of UN demands that such potentially lethal action be immediately stopped.

Right, Wrong Or Just Confusing

A careful reading of the NIE assessment reveals that America's government-paid sleuths remain fairly clueless as to whether or not Iran has actually halted the clandestine nuclear weapons program which was previously said to be in operation earlier this decade. Many critics of the report charged it amounted to nothing more than a badly bruised American intelligence community attempting in advance to ward off any "blame" for possible White House-initiated military action against Iran. They note that US spy agencies are still badly bleeding from their internationally ridiculed contention that Saddam possessed WMDs, which helped spark a prolonged and costly war in Iraq that has become highly unpopular at home over the past two years.

The report actually only states "with high confidence" in its central "Key Judgment" section that Iran "halted its nuclear weapons program" in the autumn of 2003, while adding in paragraph four that "We assess with moderate confidence Tehran has not restarted its nuclear weapons program as of mid-2007." In other words, the security agencies are pretty sure that Iran's weapons program was stopped, but less certain that it was not subsequently restarted, as Israeli officials insist it was.