ABSTRACT
The clause seemed to undercut not only any argument for military action against Iran but also the Bush administration’s international campaign for sanctions against that country. Yet both the second statement and footnote were lost in the subsequent furor. The controversy over the estimate was rife with ironies. For the National Intelligence Council (NIC) and the Intelligence Community, the immediate irony was that the estimate, and the key judgments, were meticulous in many respects, and NIC leaders had worked hard to improve both the process and product of NIEs after the disaster of the October 2002 estimate about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. Iran ratified the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1968 and negotiated a safeguards agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency in 1974. The decision, made in late 2006, to write an NIE on Iran’s nuclear weapons program stemmed from several motivations.
