Legacy of Ashes?

It seems U.S. intelligence may have dropped the ball again, providing more ammunition to those written books critical of intelligence (such as this good read).  According to the WSJ today,  the 2007 NIE was dead wrong when it claimed Iran had suspended its nuclear weapons program. Despite the Germans sharing their intelligence to the contrary, which was recently upheld in strong words by a high court, U.S. intelligence stuck with their story.  Why?  Two spins on a similar argument are floating around the blogosphere:

According to the Weekly Standard, the Iraq disaster prompted severe lowballing:

Back in 2007, US intelligence officials — fearing an overestimation of WMD capabilities similar to Iraq circa 2002 — severely lowballed their analysis of Iran’s nuclear weapons program. Their product, the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran, put the Bush administration on the defensive and claimed that the Iranians had stopped work on the development of a nuclear warhead.

Ed Morrissey takes it a bit further and argues the 2007 NIE was the IC’s payback to the Bush administration:

It’s really not difficult to conclude that the higher echelons of American intelligence had gone to war with the Bush administration early in his presidency. The 2007 NIE was their coup de grace, making Bush impotent and giving them control over American foreign policy.

It is also possible we were just wrong and stubborn but it seems there was something curious about the 2007 NIE.  Regardless of where one comes down on the underestimate-coup d’etat discussion the importance of the “mistake” is monumental as explained in the December 3, 2007 New York Times (and found by the National Post):

Rarely, if ever, has a single intelligence report so completely, so suddenly, and so surprisingly altered a foreign policy debate here.

That comes at a time when Clinton and Kyl are both emphasizing the urgency with which something needs to be done on Iran.  One silver lining might be the German intelligence statement last week:

Germany’s top spy agency said Iran could have an atomic bomb within four to six years, playing down a report in Stern magazine that the government in Tehran could detonate a nuclear device within six months.

If they were right about whether Iran was pursuing the capability they probably also have a good grasp of when that might happen.  In an interesting coincidence:

The German prediction is in line with a U.S. National Intelligence Estimate issued in November 2007