Conflict Blotter

Here’s the declassified summary of the National Intelligence Estimate. Pretty much a waste of time and nothing we didn’t already know. The seven page document consists of five pages on how to read the NIE and just two pages rehashing what we already know: Al Qaeda is out to get us and thus “the United States currently is in a heightened threat environment.” The NIE concludes that after Al Qaeda, Hezbollah poses the greatest threat to the US, if it felt the US was threatening its survival.

Despite many years of alarmist warnings that Hezbollah has an army of sleeper cells ready to strike as soon as Iran gives the order, those fears have not yet been born out. Despite Hezbollah’s strong Iranian ties, I tend to view Hezbollah, like Hamas, more as a single issue group that focuses its fight on Israel and its internal political status inside Lebanon.

There are scenarios, however, where Hezbollah may feel significantly threatened by the US to strike back. If the US was nearing a substantive deal with Syria that would bring Damascus in from the cold in exchange for, among other things, cutting off support to Hezbollah, then I suspect the Shiite militants would likely view that as a potential existential threat that would warrant broadening their struggle.

The declassified NIE that was released publicly is really just a glossy press release and it seems that the juiciest bits of what the classified document contains has been left out. Eli Lake had this article in the NY Sun about about what the classified NIE contained, namely that Al Qaeda is using Eastern Iran as a base of operations. Such accusations, in the NY Sun especially, are likely to be brushed off as right wing war mongering for an attack on Iran. Perhaps. I’ve known Eli for a long time and trust his reporting. Also, in his article he cites Roger Cressey, the former deputy to a counterterrorism tsar Richard Clarke, and CFR senior fellow Vali Nasr, neither of whom can be considered right wing hawks.

One of two known Al Qaeda leadership councils meets regularly in eastern Iran, where the American intelligence community believes dozens of senior Al Qaeda leaders have reconstituted a good part of the terror conglomerate’s senior leadership structure.

“We know that there were two Al Qaeda centers of gravity. After the Taliban fell, one went to Pakistan, the other fled to Iran,” Roger Cressey, a former deputy to a counterterrorism tsar, Richard Clarke, said in an interview yesterday. “The question for several years has been: What type of operational capability did each of these centers have?”

A senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and Iran expert, Vali Nasr, said he did not know that the [Al Qaeda consensus building organization] Shura Majlis had reconstituted in eastern Iran, but he did say his Iranian contacts had confirmed recent NATO intelligence that Iran had begun shipping arms to Al Qaeda’s old Afghan hosts, the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Mr. Nasr, however, said Iran’s recent entente with Al Qaeda could be simply a matter of statecraft. “Iran and Al Qaeda do not have to like one another,” he said. “They can hate each other, they can kill each other, their ultimate goals may be against one another, but for the short term Iran can unleash Al Qaeda on the United States.”

Mr. Cressey said the Iranian regime’s relationship with Al Qaeda is one of tolerance as opposed to command and control.

“I think the Iranians are giving these guys enough latitude to operate to give them another chit in the game of U.S.-Iranian relations,” he said.