Word: nies
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...Joint Chiefs; and Admiral William Fallon, who oversees the U.S. forces that would have had to wage that war. In recent months, all have pushed back privately and publicly, on the wisdom of going to war with Tehran. Indeed, the Pentagon's intelligence units were instrumental in forming the NIE's conclusions...
...other targets inside Iran were carried out by the Air Force and Navy, the two services who have sat, somewhat frustrated, on the sidelines as the Army and Marine Corps has done the heavy lifting in the two wars now under way. Some Pentagon officials welcomed the new NIE as evidence that the intelligence community is not tied to ideology, as some critics argued was true during the buildup to the Iraq...
Still, Pentagon officials made it clear that this was not a political move by the brass - that the military's lack of desire for another conflict and the conclusions of the new NIE are coincidental. They stress that the military focuses on "intentions, not capabilities" when assessing threats, and that the final unclassified portion of the NIE warns that the intelligence community believes "with high confidence that Iran has the scientific, technical and industrial capacity eventually to produce nuclear weapons if it decides...
However, Gates left no doubt where he stands on how to proceed, saying that the revised NIE shows that non-military measures are the best way to curb Iran's nuclear program. "If anything," he said in Kabul, "the new national estimate validates the Administration's strategy of bringing diplomatic and economic pressures to bear on the Iranian government to change its policies...
...Given the Bush Administration's unhappy history of political battles over intelligence findings, the likelihood is that the latest finding will spur a fierce new round of bureaucratic infighting. Whether they support the new Iran finding or oppose it, both sides will likely invoke the fact that the prewar NIE that portrayed Iraq as a WMD threat was so egregiously wrong. Intelligence findings, after all, are judgments based on the analysis of available facts - it's not so much an inexact science as an inexact art. Still, for those in Washington pressing for a more aggressive Iran strategy...