Israel Matzav

Is time on our side?

Gabriel Schoenfeld raises the scary thought that maybe we really don't know what's going on in Iran, and that the Iranians are further along toward producing a nuclear weapon than we think they are.

The track record of U.S. intelligence in predicting major nuclear events, including some that came “utterly without warning, overnight,” does not exactly inspire confidence. Among the milestones of the nuclear age that the CIA failed to foresee were the first Soviet A-bomb test in 1949, the first Soviet H-bomb test in 1953, the first Chinese nuclear test in 1964, and the first Indian nuclear test in 1974. Before 1991, the CIA disastrously underestimated the progress of Saddam Hussein’s nuclear program. In 2002, it committed the same disastrous error in reverse, seeing weapons of mass destruction in Iraq when there were none. In 2007, it declared that Iran had halted its nuclear program in 2004 when it clearly did not.

Time may be on our side in dealing with Iran—but then again it may not. We are being asked to gamble that we will not suffer a rude awakening. For an analyst as thoughtful as James Fallows to assert categorically that we will not be taken by surprise is itself a surprise. One might even call it an intelligence failure.

Hmmm.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 10:06 AM