My Take On Iran's Nuclear Arms Program

This post is in response to this New York Times article:

A new assessment by American intelligence agencies released Monday concludes that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 and that the program remains frozen, contradicting a judgment two years ago that Tehran was working relentlessly toward building a nuclear bomb.

The conclusions of the new assessment are likely to reshape the final year of the Bush administration, which has made halting Iran’s nuclear program a cornerstone of its foreign policy.

The assessment, a National Intelligence Estimate that represents the consensus view of all 16 American spy agencies, states that Tehran is likely to keep its options open with respect to building a weapon, but that intelligence agencies “do not know whether it currently intends to develop nuclear weapons.”

Read the rest at the link above.

I hope this is true. I am pretty sure it is not.

The way I understand it that one defector from Iran has stated the country stopped their nuclear arms program in 2003. That is great, but were is the hard proof. There is not any.

I can't help but think this has something to do with the "Middle East" peace plans Bush and Rice have been working on. I know they are willing to bend over backwards to convince the Israeli government to hand over land to the Palestinians.

What it will do is allow countries to ease restrictions on trade with Iran. It will be used against Bush every time you turn around. (Bush lied again). It will embolden Iran. Hell it already has:

A new U.S. intelligence review concluding Iran stopped developing an atomic weapons program in 2003 is a "declaration of victory" for Iran's nuclear program, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Wednesday.

Russia's foreign minister, meanwhile, indicated that the U.S. report's findings undermined Washington's push for a new set of U.N. sanctions against Iran.

The U.S. intelligence report released Monday concluded that Iran had stopped its weapons program in late 2003 and shown no signs since of resuming it, representing a sharp turnaround from a previous intelligence assessment in 2005.

"This is a declaration of victory for the Iranian nation against the world powers over the nuclear issue," Ahmadinejad told thousands of people during a visit to Ilam province in western Iran.

"This was a final shot to those who, in the past several years, spread a sense of threat and concern in the world through lies of nuclear weapons," Ahmadinejad said, drawing celebratory whistles from the crowd.

Several reports I have read in the past few years said all that was holding Iran's nuclear program up was the ability to enrich uranium. So of course the program was frozen so they could learn how to accomplish this. Well, back to the New York times article:

Iran is continuing to produce enriched uranium, a program that the Tehran government has said is intended for civilian purposes. The new estimate says that the enrichment program could still provide Iran with enough raw material to produce a nuclear weapon sometime by the middle of next decade, a timetable essentially unchanged from previous estimates.