We know Iran is running a nuclear program. We believe they are trying to build weapons. We might be wrong. This is the very nature of the intelligence business. We can rarely know things.

"Knowing" things requires trusted human beings on the ground in foreign countries. This is difficult when you don't have human beings who can blend in. Most intelligence information that is gathered today is electronic (including emails, telephone calls, sattelite imagery, etc.), but electronic information can be false or (sometimes intentionally) misleading. There is very little human intelligence because very few people with the clearance to know something will betray that trust. For example, nuclear engineers in Iran are highly cleared by the Iranian government. They are likely well compensated and believe in their government's goals. As such, they aren't likely to knowingly call up the CIA and tell them what they know. They also aren't likely to smuggle out documents or other evidence of Iran's plans.

The CIA theoretically could send an American of Iranian descent into Iran to infiltrate their nuclear research areas, but doing so is extremely difficult and rarely works (plus they'd first have to find one that was willing to try). They'd have to set up someone and hope they could provide a clean enough background for that person that the Iranian government would clear him into their program. This is extremely unlikely (so unlikely that the CIA doesn't regularly try such missions as there isn't enough success to justify the cost). Instead the CIA hopes to recruit "agents" from the Iranian public, generally these are either paid informants, or more rarely, informants who have some objection to the way their own government does things. Quite often, these people dislike their own actions (they feel they are betraying their country and therefore give false information) and also, quite often, they are wrong. Because of this, human intelligence of this sort is often deemed unreliable.

All of this leads to the undeniable fact that we can't really "know" much about secret projects in any hostile nation (or even friendly ones for that matter). That being said, we still have to act in the best of intentions with whatever intelligence we have, don't we?

As it turns out, you and I appear to agree on Iran, and despite the WMD mess, we've both stated that we're happy with Saddam Hussein's removal. The question still remains though, for what other issues would you support war?

Would you support war to stop starvation in a country? Institutionalized torture and/or rape? Slavery? Genocide? Terrorism? Tyrrany? Female mutilation? Just wondering.

-- Jeff

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"Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem." --Ronald Reagan