Talking about Iran

Over the past couple of months you've probably talked about Iran with your friends. Well, Seymour Hersh has done the same thing except that his friends are people like generals, ambassadors, intelligence officers, government officials. Clearly, Seymour's friends should be more knowledgeable than yours. But are they?

Hersh's article in the current New Yorker tells us about his recent conversations. I wonder how much these conversations differed from yours. His friends have concluded that our intelligence about Iran is very poor. We don't know how far along they are. We don't know where the work is being done. We don't know how far they will go.

The military friends are concerned that we'd have difficulty bombing Iraq as we cannot identify all the targets. We don't even know how large the underground facilities at Natanz are or in which direction the underground chambers flow. They worry about the hundreds of secret piers from which Iran could launch suicide vessels. And, of course, they worry about whether Iran will move into Iraq and what such a move would do to our troops.

A former aide in Bush's National Security Council raises the spectre of Russia moving into the Middle East.

The article closes by quoting Mohamed ElBaradei, "We should have learned some lessons from Iraq. We should have learned that we should be very careful about assessing our intelligence... We should have learned that we should try to exhaust every possible diplomatic means to solve the problem before thinking of any other enforcement measures.....When you push a country into a corner, you are always giving the driver's seat to the hard-liners...If Iran were to move out of the nonproloferation regime altogether, if Iran were to develop a nuclear weapon program, we clearly will have a much, much more serious problem."