WASHINGTON, Dec. 4 — President Bush warned on Tuesday that Iran remained a threat despite an intelligence assessment that it had halted a covert program to develop nuclear weapons four years ago, as the administration struggled to save a diplomatic process now in disarray.
Once again facing criticism over the handling — and meaning — of intelligence reports, Mr. Bush said the new assessment underscored the need to intensify international efforts to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon.
He said Iran could not be entrusted with acquiring even the scientific knowledge to enrich uranium for peaceful civilian use, explicitly declaring for the first time what has been an underlying premise of the administration’s policy. He also appeared to rule out any new diplomatic initiative with the president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
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“Look, Iran was dangerous, Iran is dangerous, and Iran will be dangerous, if they have the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon,” Mr. Bush said during a news conference dominated by questions about the fallout of the assessment, known as a National Intelligence Estimate. “What’s to say they couldn’t start another covert nuclear weapons program?”
The assessment reversed one in 2005 that asserted that Iran was “determined to develop nuclear weapons,” with American intelligence agencies now saying that they do not know whether Iran intends to take that step.
Mr. Bush said the reversal was based on “a great discovery” by American intelligence agencies, but neither he nor other officials would elaborate. Current and former American and foreign officials said the new findings were based on intercepted communications and accounts provided by individuals with access to information about Iran’s nuclear program.
Representative Jane Harman, a Democrat of California, said she read the classified version of the report on Tuesday and described the intelligence agencies’ work as “a sea change” from the 2005 assessment in the quality of its analysis and presentation of facts. Asked about the basis for the new findings, she said: “I think we have some better sourcing. That’s all I can say.”
Mr. Bush’s remarks did little to silence critics, who have accused him of hyping the case for confronting Iran. Nor did it ease concerns of some allies.
Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a Republican, said he was perplexed by the new assessment and suspicious of the new evidence. “We should all look under the hood of these intelligence reports,” he said.
Mr. Bush and his senior aides spent the day trying to hold together the already fragile coalition of world powers seeking to rein in Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Mr. Bush telephoned President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, who has voiced skepticism about an aggressive American effort to punish and isolate Iran.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice also telephoned her counterparts from the five other countries that have been pursuing United Nations sanctions against Iran to urge that the coalition continue work on a new round of increasingly tighter sanctions.
“This report is not an ‘O.K., everybody needs to relax and quit’ report,” Mr. Bush said. “This is a report that says what has happened in the past could be repeated and that the policies used to cause the regime to halt are effective policies. And let’s keep them up. Let’s continue to work together.”
There were already signs that that effort had been complicated by the new report. R. Nicholas Burns, the under secretary of state for political affairs, held a teleconference call Tuesday morning with his counterparts from France, Germany, China, Britain and Russia.
“We’re all flabbergasted,” one European diplomat said of the report generally. “You get such a surprise, and then you sit together and consider how to move forward. To be on safe ground, we decided to keep moving forward” with the effort to press for further sanctions.
A senior administration official said the intelligence assessment on Iran was a setback in the effort to persuade China to endorse a new round of sanctions at the United Nations Security Council. While there had been indications over the weekend that the Chinese might drop their opposition to such a move, it appeared on Tuesday that they were reconsidering again, the official said.
The new intelligence assessment, the official said, “gives the Chinese an opportunity to get off the hook.”
Mr. Bush opened himself to new criticism over his credibility when he said that the director of national intelligence, Mike McConnell, alerted him about new intelligence about Iran’s weapons program in August but did not explain what it was in detail.
As recently as October, Mr. Bush continued to warn darkly of Iran’s nuclear weapons threat, invoking World War III, despite the new information. He responded to a question about that on Tuesday by saying he had received the final assessment, with its drastically altered findings, only last week.
“That’s not believable,” said Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, the Democrat who is chairman of the foreign relations committee and a candidate for president. “I refuse to believe that. If that’s true, he has the most incompetent staff in American, modern American history and he’s one of the most incompetent presidents in modern American history.”
While many officials, lawmakers and diplomats focused on the halting of Iran’s weapons program, Mr. Bush emphasized the report’s finding that “a growing amount of intelligence indicates Iran was engaged in covert uranium conversion and uranium enrichment activity” from the late 1980s until the freezing of that effort in 2003. Mr. Bush’s senior aides describe that as the first evidence of what many officials had only suspected.
“And so I view this report as a warning signal that they had the program,” Mr. Bush said. “They halted the program. And the reason why it’s a warning signal is that they could restart it.”
Critics, though, blamed the administration’s hard line and harsh language for compounding Iran’s determination and undermining diplomatic efforts. They called on the administration to make a more concerted diplomatic effort to persuade Iran’s government to abide by its commitments to the International Atomic Energy Agency.
“Their actions have been totally self-defeating,” Mr. Biden said of the Bush administration. “Every time they rattle the saber, what happens is the security premium for oil goes up. It raises the price of oil. It puts more money in the pocket of Ahmadinejad and the very people we think are the bad guys.”
Mr. Bush maintained that the administration had made offers to Iran as part of the European Union’s diplomatic efforts as long ago as 2003, including promising American support for membership in the World Trade Organization and an easing of sanctions to allow the sale of spare airplane parts.
“What changed was the change of leadership in Iran,” he said, referring to the elections in Iran in 2005. “We had a diplomatic track going, and Ahmadinejad came along and took a different tone. And the Iranian people must understand that the tone and actions of their government are that which is isolating them.”
Flynt Leverett, a Middle East expert at the New America Foundation who served on the National Security Council under Mr. Bush, said the president had consistently ruled out any real entreaty to Iran that could resolve the international deadlock over its nuclear ambitions.
“The really uncomfortable part for the administration, aside from the embarrassment, is the policy implication,” Mr. Leverett said of the assessment. “The dirty secret is the administration has never put on the table an offer to negotiate with Iran the issues that would really matter: their own security, the legitimacy of the Islamic republic and Iran’s place in the regional order.”
source: 5dec2007
JERUSALEM, Dec. 4 — Israel said Tuesday that it remained convinced that Iran was pursuing nuclear weapons and that it had probably resumed the weapons program the Americans said was stopped in the fall of 2003.
The defense minister, Ehud Barak, rejected the American assessment of “moderate confidence” that Tehran had not restarted its nuclear weapons program by mid-2007 and that the end to the program “represents a halt to Iran’s entire nuclear weapons program.” He suggested that Israel would not rest in its efforts to stop Iran’s activities.
“It is our responsibility to ensure that the right steps are taken against the Iranian regime,” Mr. Barak told Israeli Army radio. “As is well known, words don’t stop missiles.”
He added: “It is apparently true that in 2003 Iran stopped pursuing its military nuclear program for a certain period of time. But in our estimation, since then it is apparently continuing with its program.”
In other words, whereas the Americans say Iran has stopped its nuclear weapons program while continuing to enrich uranium as rapidly as it can, Israel contends that Iran has resumed its nuclear weapons program with the clear aim of building a nuclear bomb.
Assessments may differ, Mr. Barak said, “but we cannot allow ourselves to rest just because of an intelligence report from the other side of the Earth, even if it is from our greatest friend.”
Mr. Barak also said that what appeared to be the source for the American assessment on the weapons program was no longer functioning. “We are talking about a specific track connected with their weapons building program, to which the American connection, and maybe that of others, was severed,” Mr. Barak said cryptically.
It was only on Tuesday, Israeli officials said, that Israel received and began to assess a copy of the classified American report, which is believed to run some 130 pages.
President Bush will visit the Middle East in early January, the White House said Tuesday. It declined to provide details, but Israeli newspapers and broadcast media said Mr. Bush would be making the first visit of his presidency to Israel in January.
Mark Regev, a spokesman for Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, said diplomacy remained the correct path for now to deter Iran from developing a nuclear bomb. But he was explicit about the Israeli conclusion that Iran’s intention was military, not civilian.
“We believe that the purpose of the Iranian nuclear program is to achieve nuclear weapons,” he said. “There is no other logical explanation for the investment the Iranians have made in their nuclear program.”
Mr. Olmert, who was briefed on the new assessment in Washington last week, tried to play down the gap in judgments with the United States. “According to this report, and to the American position, it is vital to continue our efforts, with our American friends, to prevent Iran from obtaining nonconventional weapons,” he said.
The American assessment said Iran probably halted the weapons program “primarily in response to international pressure,” a judgment Israel embraced as a call for further diplomatic action.
But Israeli experts on Iran said that the American report would make any action against Iran less likely, whether diplomatic or military, and that it would probably kill or dilute American-led efforts to pass another sanctions resolution through the United Nations Security Council.
Efraim Kam, a former Israeli military intelligence official who is now at Tel Aviv University, said the report “makes it very hard for anyone in the United States or Israel who was thinking of going for a military option.”
Mr. Kam said the American assessment surprised him. “The report says its assessment is correct for now — but it could change anytime,” he said. “Maybe the Iranians assessed that it was better for them to halt the military program and concentrate on enriching uranium,” which takes a long time, “and then go back to it.”
Efraim Halevy, a former director of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, said Iran was pursing a nuclear weapon. The American report, he said, “provides no reason to say the threat is gone — it’s not.” He added, “They can stop on the edge of the project to weaponize and decide to proceed at any time.”
As for the role or weight of Israeli intelligence in the American assessments, both in 2005 and now, Mr. Halevy said no country, and especially not the United States, would rely on a foreign assessment without making its own. “No matter how close allies are, you don’t as a rule rely solely on the information of others.”
source: 5dec2007
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