NIE fallout

update: Jonathan Schell says that we’re screwed:

We are left in a situation that layers paradox upon paradox. A disastrous possible policy - military attack on Iran - has been headed off by a misguided, misinterpreted intelligence report …. But, report or no report, the danger that Iran will acquire nuclear weapons is real, and may even have increased. What’s missing is a policy to address it

The Brits are furious:

British spy chiefs have grave doubts that Iran has mothballed its nuclear weapons programme, as a US intelligence report claimed last week, and believe the CIA has been hoodwinked by Teheran.

The timing of the CIA report has also provoked fury in the British Government, where officials believe it has undermined efforts to impose tough new sanctions on Iran and made an Israeli attack on its nuclear facilities more likely.

The IAEA and the French are withering in their analysis:

An unnamed senior official described by The New York Times as close to the International Atomic Energy Agency, a UN organization often derided as a soft on Iran by the Bush administration, scorned the U.S. agencies’ estimate as mushy.

“To be frank,” the official said, “we are more skeptical. We don’t buy the American analysis 100 percent. We are not that generous with Iran.”

In France, where the government of Nicolas Sarkozy, acting in coordination with Washington, has made vast efforts to enact separate European Union sanctions going beyond those of the UN Security Council, the report was characterized by an expert on nuclear proliferation as occasionally brushing close to the “hallucinatory.”

The expert, who requested not to be identified more specifically, said it was politically striking that the estimate began its “key judgments” section with its assertion that the Iranians halted work on weapons. This was described as notable since the report also acknowledged that “intelligence gaps” led two agencies, the National Intelligence Council and the Department of Energy, to question whether this conclusion had sufficient quality of information and corroboration.

Referring to the wide range of Iran’s possible weaponization activities (development of explosives and work on design, for example), those two agencies were only “moderately certain” that the entire Iranian weapons project came to a halt, the expert noted.

Whatever the fallout, though, it’s done now and can’t be undone—anotherb stellar performance from the Bush administration.