The NIE is like that, a year ago, there was a rumor that the nuclear enrichment wasn’t going so swimmingly, this December they verified it. It got released. “Not good enough!” some scream.

Great. The same group willing to give Bill a pass on OBL because he didn’t KNOW that he was a psychotic, mass-murdering, nihilist in the legal sense before 9/11, want 100% accuracy from the exact same apparatus.

That is so cool!

yep. he sure did. His head of intelligence came up to him in August and told him there was important news about Iran they were vetting, and he said “okay”. I suppose he didn’t want to hear it until it was crystal clear. Let the IC vet the info properly.
I wonder where all these claims of Cheney leaning on the IC to “hawk up” the NIC come from:
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/2007/12/seymour_hersh_bush_admin_has_k.php
Well, if the Administration said they didn’t hear it until last week, then that settles it.

He said specifically that he was just briefed about this a week ago.

The “far from it, I’d say” — is that based off NIE text or external sources?

The NIE leaves a lot of questions unanswered.
The claim that “international pressure” from sanctions were the cause of Iran’s decision cease its covert nuclear weapons program is tough to square with their refusal to fully cooperate with the IAEA, therby removing the existing sanctions and the threat of future sanctions. Likewise, there is just insufficient information in the NIE to give one an indepnednet warm and fuzzy feeling about their conclusions. That said, like you, I will give our intel folks the benefit of the doubt.

Its unforgivable though that the NIE ignored Iraq. The NIE ignores the two huge elephants in the room - i.e., what role our invasion of Iraq played in Iran’s 2003 decision to stop their covert nuclear weapons program, and what role our continued presence in Iraq is effecting their decision to keep the program in stasis.

Anyone that is breathing a sigh of relief is listening to Larry Johnson & Co way too much.

Six years until nuclear armageddon in the Mideast instead of six months. I guess we can all relax and elect a Dhimmicrat.

Of course as Wes mentions, this assumes you can trust a perennially behind-the-curve intelligence community which has clearly been shown to be full of Clinton-era insurgents.

Even if you don’t trust the Iranians farther than you can throw them, the National Intelligence Estimate on their nuclear program should enable you to breathe a sigh of relief.

That depends on whether we can trust our own intelligence community farther than we can throw them, doesn’t it? How many things have they been wrong about in the recent past? Here’s a few:

–They grossly underestimated Saddam’s WMD capabilities before and during the first Gulf War - afterwards we found out Saddam was within six months of having a working nuclear device - and grossly overestimated them in the run-up to Gulf War II. And the spies still haven’t sastifactorily accounted for the WMD Saddam did have.

–Nobody in the intelligence community saw the Indo-Pakastani nuclear testing duel coming. Or the fall of the USSR. Or 9/11.

–Nor did they do a very good job of keeping track of what the North Koreans had and what they were doing with it. And, now, suddenly we find out that Syria was apparently building a processing plant to turn Nork plutonium into functioning nuclear weapons. Fortunately, the Mossad and the IDF were on the ball there…

I hope the NIE is right, but based on the past performance of some of our intelligence agencies I’m still skeptical. And - regardless of how the Administration and Congress try to spin this - the fact remains that the Iranians are still at war with us, as they have been since 1979. Never mind “squaring Bush’s World War III comment” with the NIE; how do you square the apocalyptic and genocidal rhetoric of Mahmoud Ahmendinajad and the mullahs with the NIE’s apparent “Relax, don’t worry” message?