Personal Intelligence Agency Alert

The link to the explanation of the PIA Alert is here. A new PIA Alert was triggered by The New Yorker, which screamed the following on the tear-away cover tease of its March 6 issue: "NEXT STOP IRAN. As Iran becomes a nuclear threat...." 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, The New Yorker appears to have its own Personal (or in this case Private) Intelligence Agency, the information from which has caused the magazine to reach a radically different conclusion than the large and well-funded intelligence community that includes the CIA, DIA and NSA. The marketing of Target Iran---the second half of what's so far been a horrible double-feature---continues apace.

(As a sidenote, a series of PIA Alert claxons sounded over the weekend during the Fox News program "Iran and the Bomb." Featuring images of Lenin and a wildly gesticulating Hitler to bolster dark intimations from Donald Rumsfeld and John Bolton, this was about as objective a program as one might expect from this outfit. I was on an airplane and a bit of a captive viewer, so I watched Fox for the first time in many months---a time interval I recommend to those still tuning in regularly for some reason. Fox's popularity is both a measure of our collective gullibility and a black mark on our culture. I suspect that a few decades from now, people will shake their heads in "what were they thinking" amazement just as we snicker about those crude World War II-era propaganda newsreels.)

The New Yorker piece by Connie Bruck contains little information on Iran's actual nuclear program. Instead, it focuses mainly on the efforts of Reza Pahlavi---the Shah's son and a sort of poor man's Ahmad Chalabi---to mobilize resistance to Iran's current government. Bruck describes Reza's association with notorious characters from his father's regime including former SAVAK division head Parviz Sabeti. (By the way, under the category of "you couldn't make this up," apparently Sabeti is a financial supporter of both George Bush and the RNC if the information at this link is correct and it's the same person, currently listed as "self employed" and residing inside a post office box in Florida.) Reza Pahlavi holding himself out to Iranians as a beacon of liberty is a bit like Mussolini's son suddenly showing up in Rome expecting to reinvigorate Italian fascism. As a measure of his credibility and perhaps his delusion, Reza tries to rewrite the history books on his father's tyranny and torture: "Maybe what happened twenty-six years ago is a blessing in disguise. I don't think we could have had the appreciation for democratic values we have come to today. It's by losing democracy that we have come to value it." Incredible, eh? If this is our best prospect for post-Mullah leadership (and Michael Ledeen has argued as much in the past; in this piece he describes Reza as "widely admired inside Iran," and among Ledeen's inimitable "trusted sources" I don't doubt it) then we've got big problems to go with our big cojones.