Stop me if you’ve heard this before: The United States goes to war in a Middle Eastern country starting with the letters “I-R-A,” based on disputed and later-disproven intelligence about that country’s pursuit of devastating weaponry.
It happened two decades ago with Iraq; it’s valid to ask whether it could be happening again with Iran.
And it’s a legitimate question in large part because President Donald Trump and his administration have credibility problems of their own making.
They’re asking the American people for a huge amount of faith on the most serious of issues, without having put in the work to build that trust.
As Trump has increasingly flirted with joining Israel’s strikes on Iran in recent days, he’s argued that Iran has been very close to a nuclear weapon.
“I think they were a few weeks away from having one,” he said Wednesday, seemingly referring to the period before Israel first struck Iran’s nuclear program last week.
But that’s very difficult to square with the March testimony of Trump’s own director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, and plenty of other indicators.
Gabbard testified less than three months ago that her own intelligence community “continues to assess Iran is not building a nuclear weapon.” She also said that Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had “not authorized a nuclear weapons program that he suspended in 2003.”
That testimony looms extremely large right now. CNN reported this week that the intelligence community has indeed estimated Iran was up to three years away from being able to produce and deliver a nuclear weapon to a target of its choosing.
The administration and its allies have struggled to account for all of this.
Trump on Tuesday effectively dismissed Gabbard’s testimony, saying, “I don’t care what she said.”
Gabbard has claimed she and Trump are on the “same page.” An official in her office told CNN that “just because Iran is not building a nuclear weapon right now, doesn’t mean they aren’t ‘very close’ as President Trump said.”
Republican Sen. Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma suggested to CNN’s Jake Tapper on Wednesday that Gabbard had old information and that the Trump administration now has better information.
“In March, she was in her job for 30 days and [was] still getting handoff information from the I.C., the American intelligence community, from the Biden administration,” Mullin said. He added that the “information was quite different.”
But when pressed on what better information we have now, Mullin didn’t go into too much detail. He noted that he had to be careful, while largely pointing to what Israeli intelligence had told the US.
Signals from Democrats in Congress have been more mixed. Rep. Adam Smith of Washington state, the ranking member on the House Armed Services Committee, told NPR on Thursday that Iran “probably likely” does have at least something of a nuclear weapons program. But the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Mark Warner of Virginia, told CNN’s Kasie Hunt on Wednesday that intelligence Gabbard cited hadn’t really changed.
He said that was the case as recently as Monday of this week.
In response to Warner’s comments, the White House pointed to recent comments from US Central Command chief Gen. Michael Kurilla, who told the Senate Armed Services Committee that the International Atomic Energy Agency estimated that an Iranian “sprint to a nuclear weapon” could produce enough weapons-grade material for 10 nuclear weapons within three weeks.
But producing the material is not the same as having a bomb that’s deliverable, which is the significant hurdle that underpins the intelligence community’s much longer timeline.
Warner suggested the administration was in the process of trying to “cook the books.”
“When you cook intelligence, you end up with a war like Iraq, where a president at that point didn’t follow the intelligence and the intelligence was manipulated,” the Virginia Democrat said. “I worry that we may be seeing some of that going on.”
So is that happening now? There’s much we have to learn here. But to the extent Trump and his administration actually intend to build a case for war, they have done themselves few favors.
Gabbard’s testimony might be the biggest problem for the White House.
Here was the administration less than three months ago – in a prepared statement, no less – saying that this just wasn’t an immediate problem. It’s possible for assessments to evolve and/or that Iran re-launched the program in the intervening period.
But the administration hasn’t done much of anything to signal any shifts before this week. At least with Iraq, the Bush administration was providing details of what it said the intelligence showed – claims that could be evaluated.
Even the Kurilla comments the administration points to don’t actually contradict what Gabbard said, what Warner is saying and what CNN has reported about US civilian intelligence community assessments.
And even if Gabbard and those assessments got it wrong then, who’s to say the administration isn’t getting it wrong now?
Trump’s flippant response to the question about Gabbard’s comments epitomized the distinct lack of details here.
And then there’s the relevant history, which adds weight to Warner’s worries about cooking the books.
When you’re relaying sensitive intelligence, there’s always a bit of faith involved. The administration can’t share everything that it has, because that could jeopardize its operations and collection methods.
But Trump over the years has proven anything but careful about the things he says. During his first term, he amassed more than 30,000 false and misleading claims, according to a Washington Post compilation. Trump often seems to say whatever’s politically expedient at a given point in time.
And the American people have noticed. A February Washington Post/Ipsos poll showed just 35% of Americans said Trump was “honest and trustworthy”; 62% took the opposite view.
That’s a bad thing when the stakes are much lower; it’s potentially much worse when the claims involved are about a case for war.
The final point is that we already have evidence that the Trump administration could be politicizing intelligence.
The administration back in March staked its attempts to rapidly deport undocumented immigrants on the idea that the government of Venezuela was somehow involved in an “invasion” by members of the gang Tren de Aragua.
But that’s not actually what the intelligence showed. Indeed, a memo that was later released contradicted claims the administration was making.
And both Reuters and The New York Times later reported that internal communications suggested some in the administration had injected politics into the intelligence process. According to the Times, Gabbard’s chief of staff at one point wrote, “We need to do some rewriting” and more analysis “so this document is not used against the DNI or POTUS” – referring to Gabbard and Trump.
Around this time, Gabbard fired the top two career officials leading the National Intelligence Council.
The administration at the time suggested it was these nonpartisan officials who were politicizing intelligence. But the email contents strongly suggest politics loomed over how Trump’s appointees were handling intelligence.
All of which looms large over what happens next. The American people appear quite skeptical of striking Iran, and that could be doubly fraught given the administration’s track record.
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