It was just about 10 days ago that Iran's bombastic president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, publicly boasted that Tehran had enriched uranium to nearly 20 percent purity -- a key development on the path to nuclear weapons.
To which White House spokesman Robert Gibbs declared: "We do not believe they have the capability to enrich to the degree they say they are enriching."
Wrong-O, Bobby Boy.
The International Atomic Energy Agency reports that Iran did in fact reach the 20 percent level recently -- which "raises concerns about the possible existence in Iran of past or undisclosed activities related to the development of a nuclear payload for a missile."
So maybe it's time to take another look at that 2007 US intelligence assessment that found that Iran had halted work on a WMD program four years earlier.
Because the evidence, from a host of sources, strongly suggests otherwise.
That's especially true, now that Mohammed el Baradei, the IAEA's former head, has gone back to Egypt with his Nobel Peace Prize; as Ralph Peters notes on the previous page, the agency now can tell the truth.
And Washington desperately needs to catch up with what other Western intelligence agencies have determined about Iran's nuclear capabilities.
Bad intelligence brought about a political disaster for the Bush administration: WMDs the CIA was sure were in Iraq, weren't. This time, it's the opposite: The WMD capability that Washington's convinced doesn't exist, definitely does.
It's time to wake up on Iran. Accurate and timely intelligence would help.
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