Making the world safer, one war at a time

On the front page of yesterday's LA Times (registration required) was a story titled "U.S. Lacks Reliable Data on Iran Arms." I know this is not new news (I guess we could call it "olds") and I've blogged about this before, but I continue to be astonished that we are choosing this combat Groundhog Day approach to international relations. Here is the first paragraph of the story:

Although convinced that Iran is "vigorously" pursuing programs to produce nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, the U.S. intelligence community has few sources of reliable information on any illicit arms activities by the Islamic republic, current and former intelligence officials and Middle East experts say.

I hate to keep banging on the same drums here, but does anyone else feel like we will eventually be able to do away with journalists altogether, and we can just take last year's stories and replace the country names with this year's wars? It's like 1984's Ministry of Truth but without the effort to even thoroughly erase the record. The vast majority people don't seem to even require the Commissar Vanishes approach.

Here's a bit more from the article:

"There are parts of the Iranian world that are not impenetrable," said a former senior CIA official who left the agency several months ago. The CIA and other U.S. spy services have been able to get a steady stream of reports on political developments inside the regime, he said, and have had some success tracking Iran's support of terrorist networks, including Hezbollah.

But Tehran "is particularly controlling and tight" in maintaining secrecy around its nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs, the former official said.

"As with any country that may be pursuing WMD," he said, referring to weapons of mass destruction, "that's the most difficult nut to crack."

This is a total "have you stopped beating your wife yet" approach to the question of nuclear proliferation. And here I'd like to point out that while the left gets smeared with a characterization as a paranoid group of folks, prone to conspiracy theories, our nation's posture towards Iran seems to be: if we don't know anything about weapon-making, that's because such thing are always highly secret. In other words, the less we find out about "wmd" (which I am convinced has entered political parlance because W can't pronounce the word "nuclear"), the more reason to suspect Iran has something to hide. Let's throw the witches in the water; if they drown, they weren't witches after all.

And the article's epiphany:

The combination of the hard-line U.S. diplomatic stance and the scant underlying intelligence has prompted comparisons to the United States' flawed case for war against Iraq.

What can a person say here but "duh."

The article was inspired, in part, by the CIA report released last week "Unclassified Report to Congress on the Acquisition of Technology Relating to Weapons of Mass Destruction and Advanced Conventional Munitions." The report covers July through December 2003 and has this to say about Iran:

Iran continued to vigorously pursue indigenous programs to produce nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. Iran is also working to improve delivery systems as well as ACW. To this end, Iran continued to seek foreign materials, training, equipment, and know-how. During the reporting period, Iran still focused particularly on entities in Russia, China, North Korea, and Europe. Iran's nuclear program received significant assistance in the past from the proliferation network headed by Pakistani scientist A.Q. Khan.

Nuclear. The United States remains convinced that Tehran has been pursuing a clandestine nuclear weapons program, in contradiction to its obligations as a party to the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT). During 2003, Iran continued to pursue an indigenous nuclear fuel cycle ostensibly for civilian purposes but with clear weapons potential. International scrutiny and International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspections and safeguards will most likely prevent Tehran from using facilities declared to the IAEA directly for its weapons program as long as Tehran remains a party to the NPT. However, Iran could use the same technology at other, covert locations for military applications.

And so on. I'm not sure we can make it another four years with W in the oval office without World War III.