"Iran Hawks Down?"

Laura Rosen in MoJo, here

The intelligence community's judgment that Iran is responsive to international diplomatic pressure bolstered those in and outside the administration arguing for continued tough diplomacy to get Iran to change it behavior.

Those advocating a tougher line towards Iran naturally had a different take: "I would say that the new NIE reflects very nicely the character of the U.S. intelligence community, which is very highly confident," Patrick Clawson, an Iran proliferation expert and deputy director for research at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told Mother Jones with evident sarcasm. "You might think that an agency which is issuing a report which says its 2005 judgment was wrong would have a lot of caution about what it says it knows now" ... It says nothing, he (Clawson) noted, about what effect the halt in Iran’s nuclear weapons program has on its ability to weaponize fissile material manufactured for its civilian program. "If the information they are providing here about Iran's production of highly enriched uranium is correct," he said, "the reported halt in the weapons program has no effect."