Personal Intelligence Agency Alert

The link to the explanation of the PIA Alert is here. The previous alert is here. "Wretchard" at The Belmont Club triggered the alert with this part of a longer post (my bolds):

Ironically this may encourage what no one really wants -- a regional war -- not only from despair over the Palestinian problem but by the seemingly unstoppable Iranian drive to acquire a nuclear weapon. An imminent Iranian nuclear weapon would come close to realizing Saddam Hussein's greatest fear: an Iranian-driven empowerment of Shi'ite communities throughout Middle East. So great was that fear it made Saddam launch a pre-emptive war on Teheran in 1980, calculating he could destroy Teheran before it's superior potential could be mobilized. Where Jimmy Carter hesitated to pursue a rescue of US hostages the Iraqi dictator had no compunctions in starting the Iran-Iraq war, which was fought to a draw. Now, with a Shi'ite majority government in Iraq, Syria being pushed out of Lebanon and the possibility of an Iranian bomb, Saddam's old fear is close to coming true.

And further down, this:

Saudi Arabia together with Turkey are nervously eyeing Iran as it reaches for nuclear weapons, one from a sense of religious rivalry and the other out of a sense of national danger. Neither wants to see Iran become the regional hegemon. Yet everyone fears the steps that may be taken to prevent it. There has been widespread speculation on the feasibility of Israeli air strikes on Iranian uranium enrichment facilities. But the really effective pressure on Iran will involve what nobody even wants to think about: as Saddam Hussein demonstrated in the Iraq-Iran war, coercing Teheran involves blockading its oil exporting facilities and igniting a naval war the Persian Gulf.

Admittedly, the tortured syntax makes this one a bit hard to decipher (I've visited this blog a few times in the past, and today's check-in reminded me why I never became a regular) but several readings make it clear a PIA Alert is warranted....after all, we're already talking blockade! We know the U.S. intelligence community's current estimate is that Iran is about a decade away from the ability to produce a nuclear weapon; read about that here. Thus, unless Wretchard's definition of "seemingly unstoppable drive" and "imminent" and "reaching for nuclear weapons" and "close to coming true" is a decade, he appears to have his own Personal Intelligence Agency, the information from which has caused him to reach a radically different conclusion than the vast and well-funded U.S. intelligence community that includes the CIA, DIA and NSA.

Look, I'm aware of the danger of paralysis and national self-doubt after the WMD debacle in Iraq. There are many reasons why Iran should never be allowed to develop nuclear weapons. But unless we're ready to dismantle our entire intelligence community, we need to balance those reasons with what we know or can reasonably estimate. If the estimate was a year to Iranian nuclear capability instead of a decade, we'd be left with an entirely different set of options than we have right now. We mustn't dismiss this flexibility as academic. As someone who works in the global financial markets, I can state confidently that military action against Iran will have profound financial consequences for any American who relies on more than a log cabin, a bicycle, and barter. Balancing reward with risk and knowledge with uncertainty is how leaders once developed and implemented geopolitical strategy. Don't like it? Too rigorous? Then stop funding the intelligence community and send everyone home right now, and the kiddies can wing it and "roll around on the lawn" for the next few years like they have with Iraq, Katrina, Miers, Kerik, Plamegate, torture, NSA surveillance, and government spending.

Assuming there's still time to inject some sanity into the Iran debate---and admittedly that's a big assumption---it's important to confront and reject the fact-challenged enablers that the PIA Alert calls to account. The alternative is to sit by passively and watch as---just like the buildup to Iraq---repeated misstatements, sloppy speculation, deliberate distortions, and agenda-driven lies conspire to create a perceived "urgency" that eventually forces us all to sit through the second half of a horrible double-feature.