“Welcome to the real world,” said the national security
adviser, Stephen Hadley, to the media at a press conference
last month. He was attempting to explain to them
why the
difficulties of intelligence-gathering ought to be
understood as denying them the opportunity presented by the
new National Intelligence Estimate on the Iranian nuclear
threat for yet another cheap triumph at the expense of the
Bush administration. He would have known in advance that the
media don’t know, or at least pretend not to know, that
intelligence changes all the time without any chargeable
error to, let alone wrong-doing by, those who are
responsible for collecting it or acting on it. The certainty
that the news would be treated as yet another blow to the
administration’s much battered “credibility” must have been
behind the decision by someone in its press or political
office to try to get out in front of the breaking story by
claiming it as a victory for themselves.

“On balance, the estimate is good news,” said poor Mr.
Hadley. “On the one hand, it confirms that we were right to
be worried about Iran seeking to develop nuclear weapons. On
the other hand, it tells us that we have made some progress
in trying to ensure that that does not happen.” He did not
even mention, though others did, that the only
“international pressure” on the Iranians in 2003—mentioned
by the report as the reason for the nuclear program’s
discontinuance then—was that exerted by the