Cloak and stagger

Last month's unclassified congressional briefing on Syria's clandestine nuclear reactor, which was destroyed by Israel on Sept. 6, 2007, was yet another reminder of the challenges confronting the U.S. intelligence community. Still smarting from its gross overestimation of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, the community bent over backward to avoid overstating its case against Syria -- and in doing so, it stumbled badly.

In the Syrian case (as with the release last year of part of the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran's nuclear program) the intelligence community was unnecessarily cautious, and thereby underestimated the threats posed by Syria and Iran. Its efforts to improve precision have only created new confusion and uncertainty.

The key problem has been the intelligence community's astonishing awkwardness in making clear what's a fact and what's an inference. In the case of Iraq, there were few facts on which to build a convincing case that Saddam Hussein was arming himself with weapons of mass destruction. But Hussein's past pursuit of them, coupled with the anxieties unleashed by 9/11, led U.S. intelligence analysts and many policymakers to infer the worst and leap to conclusions unsupported by the facts.

The intelligence community has now jumped to the opposite extreme with respect to Iran's and Syria's nuclear ambitions, where there are more than a few facts. Yet it has virtually refused to draw any conclusions, no matter how obvious, about the two countries' nuclear programs. The effect has been to seriously understate the dangers Iran and Syria pose and to distort the policy options available to the U.S. to manage them.

When the unclassified summary of the NIE on Iran's nuclear program was released Dec. 3, many observers were shocked by its most prominent "key finding" -- that the intelligence community believed with "high confidence" that Iran had halted its "nuclear weapon program" in late 2003. A footnote defined "nuclear weapon program" as Iran's efforts to design a nuclear weapon and to enrich uranium in secret. That definition is extremely narrow because most proliferation experts view designing the bomb as relatively easy compared with producing the necessary fissile materials for its core and developing a delivery system.

As a result, the summary paid scant attention to those two nuclear-weapon-related -- and extremely dangerous -- activities in Iran. In fact, the summary doesn't even mention the missiles, and Iran's uranium enrichment activities, the focal point of U.S. and U.N. Security Council diplomacy and pressure, are described in the blandest of terms.