Since posting my dark suspicions about the NIE the other day, I have come to the conclusion that Gabe Schoenfeld was right to challenge the darkest of them, which was “that the intelligence community, which has for some years now been leaking material calculated to undermine George W. Bush, is doing it again.” Gabe agreed that, as he put it, “a long series of leaks have emanated from the intelligence community, many of them clearly designed to undermine or embarrass the Bush administration,” and that “some of these leaks appear to have come from ranking officials.” But he went on to argue that, given the process by which an NIE is produced, it seemed highly unlikely that this was another such case.

Some of the conclusions reached by the NIE are offered with what it calls “high confidence,” others with “moderate confidence,” and still others with “low confidence.” I offered the darkest of my own suspicions with only “moderate confidence,” to which Gabe responded as follows:

Although I remain as worried as Norman Podhoretz about the dangers posed by an Iran armed with nuclear weapons, and though there is ample reason to wonder about the quality of U.S. intelligence, I would still have to put “low confidence” in his dark suspicions.

It turns out that even his “low confidence” was too high. For it has now become clear that the White House was informed in advance of the new information that led the intelligence community to believe with “high confidence” that Iran had called a halt to its nuclear-weapons program in 2003. Moreover, far from being leaked, the new NIE was released only after its publication was authorized by the White House.

Why did the White House decide to make this new assessment public? Because, it can now be said with “high confidence,” the President found the intelligence backing it up too solid to discount. Therefore the only alternative to going public was to have it leak, which would have made the administration vulnerable to the charge that it was suppressing “unfavorable” intelligence.

There has been another suspicion expressed by some who have commented on my post: namely, that the President decided to go public because the news brought by the NIE would allow him to back away from military action against the Iranian nuclear installations. Without entirely dismissing this possibility, I find it hard to credit, if only because of what Bush went out of his way to emphasize toward the end of his press conference yesterday:

If Iran shows up with a nuclear weapon at some point in time, the world is going to say, what happened to them in 2007? How come they couldn’t see the impending danger? What caused them not to understand that a country that once had a weapons program could reconstitute the weapons program? How come they couldn’t see that the important first step in developing a weapon is the capacity to be able to enrich uranium? How come they didn’t know that with that capacity, that knowledge could be passed on to a covert program? What blinded them to the realities of the world? And it’s not going to happen on my watch.

I take this statement to mean that, so far as the President is concerned, it does not necessarily follow from the new NIE that the military option is now off the table as a last resort. And indeed, the NIE acknowledges “with moderate confidence” that “convincing the Iranian leadership to forgo the eventual development of nuclear weapons will be difficult given the linkage many within the leadership see between nuclear weapons development and Iran’s key national security and foreign policy objectives.”

Nevertheless, there is no doubt that, even if the President is still intent on keeping the military option alive, and even if the fine print in the new NIE gives him room to do so, it will now be infinitely more difficult to persuade the Iranian leadership that military force remains a possibility.

I have for some time now been predicting that before leaving office George W. Bush will order air strikes against the Iranian nuclear facilities. I have made that prediction with what the NIE would describe as “moderate confidence,” but the best I can do now is offer it with “low-to-no confidence.” For despite the President’s evident resolve to keep the military option on the table, the effect of the new NIE here at home will almost certainly make it politically impossible for him to take military action even if it becomes clearer than it already is that nothing else can prevent the Iranians from getting the bomb, or even if further investigation should reveal that the intelligence behind the NIE is faulty. Already, indeed, serious questions have been raised about the reliability of this intelligence.

In any event, there is one set of judgments I have made to which I am sticking: that neither diplomacy nor sanctions nor an internal insurrection can prevent the Iranian mullahs from getting the bomb, and that if they should get the bomb, deterrence would not work to keep them from using it. The terrible upshot is that unless we are taken off the hook by the Israelis (whose defense officials, as against the NIE, reportedly believe that the Iranian program was resumed in 2005 and is still up and running today), sooner or later a President of the United States will be forced to decide whether John McCain was right when he said that the only thing worse than bombing Iran is letting Iran get the bomb. God help us all if he—or she—decides that McCain was wrong.