Soob

Politics, Foreign Policy, Current Events and Occasional Outbursts Lacking Couth

Monday, January 21, 2008

New Yorker article on the DNI

Cryptome has archived a great new article on the DNI Mike McConnell. It's written by Lawrence Wright and covers McConnell's role within the changing intelligence community.

1 comments:

Jay@Soob said...

There's too much here to respond to right now. But:

"McConnell wondered why, if Iran had a nuclear-weapons program up until the fall of 2003, it suddenly placed it on hold. He said, "They're still pursuing fissile material, they're still building and testing and weaponizing missiles, so why did they do it?" He pointed to the invasion of Iraq earlier that year. "Although we don't have senior Iranian officials telling us, 'We did this because we were worried about where you crazy Westerners were going to go with this invasion,' I believe, as an analyst, that certainly had some bearing on the decision."

He at least "gets" Iran beyond the traditional "Islamic Revolution" or "12th Imam" facet that's most popularly utilized as focal points for discussion of Iranian intentions. All the while the more realistic strategic elements (American forces invading countries on both the east and west borders combined with the "Axis of Evil" nonsense) that Iranian policy (rhetoric) reacts to.
I'm not defending Iran, rather am willing to look well past the flapping lips and into what I view to be a more cogent reality.

January 21, 2008 at 8:39:00 PM EST  

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