Axis, Schmaxis, Part 5

This blog  has previously tracked reports of  nuclear and missile  co-development between Iran and  North  Korea;  London’s Daily  Telegraph is now  reporting a widening expansion of Iranian-North Korean nuclear cooperation.

North Korea is helping Iran to prepare an underground nuclear test similar to the one Pyongyang carried out last year.

Under the terms of a new understanding between the two countries, the North Koreans have agreed to share all the data and information they received from their successful test last October with Teheran’s nuclear scientists.

The source for this is a “senior European defence official,” who says  Iran may try to test  a nuke of its own by the end of this year.  I have seen previous reports of North Korean scientists living in Iran, helping that regime with its own nuclear program.   Which reminds me:  how goes the U.N./Soft Reich partnership  to disarm Iran diplomatically?

France expressed concern yesterday over an Iranian decision to bar 38 UN nuclear inspectors from Iran, claiming that Teheran appeared to be singling out westerners from the inspection team.

I see.  At least we have some time.

Intelligence estimates vary about how long it could take Teheran to produce a nuclear warhead. But defence officials monitoring the growing co-operation between North Korea and Iran believe the Iranians could be in a position to test fire a low-grade device — less than half a kiloton — within 12 months.

Reflexive protectors of every enemy of the United States will dredge up the intelligence fiasco of Iraq at once to cast doubt on this report, but in my mind, there is another Iraq intelligence fiasco that was potentially much more significant than the one set on their keyboard macros.   This was the revelation, after the Gulf War first brought U.N. inspectors to Iraq, that Iraq was much closer to having  a nuclear weapon than anyone had guessed:

Questions remain about the status of Iraq’s nuclear weapon program at the time of the Allied bombing campaign in 1991, when most activities were halted. Nevertheless, the Action Team inspectors have concluded that, with the accelerated effort under the crash program (described in section VII), Iraq could have finished a nuclear explosive design by the middle or end of 1991 if certain technical problems were overcome.

This alarming fact, and 2002’s highly politicized recriminations over the Clinton and Bush Administrations’ underestimation of al-Qaeda’s will and means to strike at the United States, may well have caused the intelligence community to put a hypervigilant interpretation on known facts about Iraq.  (It’s worth noting that plenty of  those findings and interpretations  were confirmed, although it’s alarming how many were discredited.)   I conclude from this that we have all come to expect too much precision from the intelligence community when it comes to secretive regimes.  Bush’s greatest mistake may have been his failure to qualify the merits of intelligence as an exact science, and to put the burden back on secretive regimes to rebut presumptions that we’re almost forced to make in the interest of our own survival.

So our intelligence isn’t very good,  but it’s also all we have.   Some have been honest enough to admit that at the root of their universal rejection of intelligence findings is their  approval of Iran and North Korea having nuclear weapons.  I wish more of them would.  The low quality of our intelligence does not lead to the conclusion that we should abandon all vigilance; it militates for a more vigilant interpretation of the facts we know.  Strong but nonviolent intervention is much more likely to work if it comes early.

In light of the  Iranian presence at last July’s North Korean missile tests, one also  hopes this will further discredit  the foolish argument that Wahhabi terrorists  would never cooperate with Shiites or Sunni secularists.  And as we have seen in history, Nazis and Stalinists were able to sign a Non-Aggression Pact, and ardent white supremacists allied themselves with Japanese and Palestinians.  What is often most surprising about extremists is how exceptionally practical they can be in the course of achieving strategic objectives.