Iran Distortions

A report on Iran’s weapon’s capabilities by a House intelligence subcommittee helpfully points out gaps in American intelligence about Tehran. Despite recognizing these intelligence gaps, the report warns that Iran “poses a serious threat to U.S. national security.”

It also questions the work of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the last group to have access to Iran’s nuclear facilities, rather than acknowledging that the agency’s information plugs many of the U.S. intelligence gaps.

This sounds a lot like the runup to the war in Iraq, which should cause lawmakers to want much more information before making any decisions about how to handle Iran.

In making its case for an invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration accused weapons inspectors from both the IAEA and the United Nations of incompetence for not finding weapons of mass destruction that the United States said Saddam Hussein was sure to have. After the invasion, U.S. forces spent months looking for chemical and biological weapons and found nothing but armaments left from the early 1990s, before the international prohibitions on Iraq’s weapons programs.

Now, a report prepared for Peter Hoekstra, the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, is implying that the IAEA is purposely going easy on Iran. The report, which was not discussed by the full committee, was written by Fredrick Fleitz, a former assistant to U.N. Ambassador John Bolton. Both men were involved in crafting U.S. policy toward Iraq before the March 2003 invasion.

The 29-page report suggests that the chief Iran inspector, Christopher Charlier, was removed by the agency “for not adhering to an unstated IAEA policy barring IAEA officials from telling the whole truth about the Iranian nuclear program.”

The report drew an angry response from the IAEA. As for Mr. Charlier, Iran asked that his designation as a weapons inspector be withdrawn, something it can do unilaterally under the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. Iran has accepted the designation of more than 200 inspectors, similar to the number accepted by other states covered by the treaty, the IAEA said in a letter last week.

The agency also says the Intelligence Committee’s contention that Iran is currently enriching uranium to “weapons grade” is false. Weapons-grade uranium is enriched to contain at least 90 percent uranium-235. Iran has reached the 3.6 percent enrichment level, according to the IAEA. The agency also criticizes the House committee for not contacting it for more information on Iran’s nuclear capability. Instead, it relied on U.S. intelligence sources, which it said were incomplete, or the Bush administration, proven to be a poor source of information on countries’ weapons capabilities.

Scott Ritter, a former chief United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq, wrote in his book “Iraq Confidential” that the United States misused the weapons-inspection process to build a case that Iraq was a threat rather than to disarm the country. Mr. Ritter sees the Bush administration doing the same thing with Iran.

Congress should not blindly go along.