This stinks to high heaven. Those intelligence agencies never agree on anything, even who the current President is, unless they are ordered to.
And even the President probably doesn’t have enough clout to order them to agree. Which implies that there is something really big going on. The President + the Senate leadership and maybe even the House leadership + the Pentagon. And it would almost have to involve Israel.
That could mean only one thing: this is being done to avert a nuclear war.
The big question is how, why and involving who?
Israel would have to be in on the deal, because it has 200+ nukes it would probably used if attacked.
Iran might have as many as a half-dozen nukes made from North Korean nuclear material, and some serious missiles that could carry them. But the whole region is blanketed with hundreds of US anti-missile missiles, protecting all the major targets. And thus the stalemate.
But what has happened?
I don’t believe for a minute that we have discovered something that can prove a negative. That is, that Iran *doesn’t* have nuclear weapons.
The only power large enough to threaten the US back would be Russia, by saying that they would retaliate if we attacked Iran.
Other than that, the only thing that would work would be if Iran opened its doors to inspectors, anywhere at any time, to include inspectors the US believed. But that could only confirm enrichment activities, not existing weapons.
Maybe the US has developed a super weapon so powerful that Iran must comply, and such a super weapon has been confirmed to the Iranians by someone they believe, so they have capitulated, but without publicly saying so.
Too many possibilities.
There’s another thread here that suggests this assesment was reached for political reasons and those would be to obtain Iranian cooperation in facilitating our exit from Iraq. Stinks is the right word. Nothing good can come from this.
People aren’t really talking about this, and I hate to get a little religious here, but in the Bible it says that in the end times Iran and Russia would form an alliance (pretty much because of two common goals: Defeat American, and Control Jerusalem). It seems like this alliance is already in the works (as seen with Russia’s reluctance to agree to UN sanctions for Iran). Knowing that Bush is a pretty religious guy, I would be willing to bet a weeks pay that he is aware of the end-times scenario as depicted in the Bible. Maybe he doesn’t want to bomb Iran because doing so would put any chances of an alliance between Iran and Russia on the fast track.