Washington: Report Spawn Fight.

It’s time for the Bush administration to stop treating every problem as if it is a nail and we need to use the hammer,” said Gordon Adams, who oversaw the defense issues for the Office of Management and Budget during the Clinton administration. “The Bush administration always seems to be spoiling for a fight. … This is a serious, serious blow to their bellicose strategy.”

Meanwhile, the Bush administration and some defense analysts latched onto the continuation of Tehran’s enrichment program as evidence the heat should be kept on. [...]

“It shows far less confidence that this program has continued to be halted than that it was halted for a time in 2003,” Anthony Cordesman, a military strategy analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, wrote in a Dec. 4 analysis of the NIE. “It states Iran’s enrichment programs allow it to move forward toward a nuclear weapons effort in spite of any continuing suspension of a formal nuclear weapons program, and it raises serious doubts as to whether Iran’s longer-term efforts to acquire nuclear weapons are negotiable.”

Read the article