Worldwide Threat: Is Iran The Biggest?

Tomorrow morning, the Senate Armed Services Committee becomes the epicenter of a prospective war with Iran. That’s because senior intelligence officials will deliver an annual assessment to Congress known as the Worldwide Threat briefing. Over the past several years, the Worldwide Threat has made for a few days’ worth of news at most. Tomorrow’s, however, will be more significant than usual: it will be a public forum for the intelligence community to either support or dissent from the Bush administration’s increasing insistence that Iran is a greater threat to U.S. interests than al-Qaeda.

Over the last several months, the Bush administration has contended — as Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns put it two weeks ago at the Brookings Institution — that Iran is “the most disruptive, negative force in the Middle East.” Long ago, this distinction was reserved for al-Qaeda.

Bush’s fixation on Iran has led to some confusing twists and turns. As TPMm pointed out earlier this month, Condoleezza Rice’s big, recent diplomatic push has been to draw the U.S. closer to the same Sunni autocrats it once contended were indirectly responsible for breeding jihadism in the Middle East — all in the name of checking Iranian influence. What was once a central contention underlying administration strategy disappeared down the memory hole. Similarly, while the administration says that the reason U.S. troops can’t leave Iraq is because the country would become a breeding ground for terrorism, the surge is focused not on Anbar province, which Bush says is an al-Qaeda stronghold, but on Baghdad, which, for all its troubles, isn’t.

Meanwhile, U.S. intelligence officials believe that al-Qaeda is regaining strength in lawless regions of Pakistan. Dick Cheney today met in Islamabad with General Pervez Musharraf to pressure him into renewing Pakistani military activity in Waziristan province, where much of the al-Qaeda infrastructure is believed to exist. In September, a National Intelligence Estimate (Warning: PDF) assessed that the Iraq war had benefited al-Qaeda by becoming a “cause celebre” for new jihadist recruits.

In light of all this, new Director of National Intelligence John McConnell, DIA chief Lt. General Michael Maples, and head DNI analyst Tom Fingar will have the job of telling Congress what the greatest threats to America currently are.

Nuances will be important, and the hearing will surely be a proving ground for getting an evaluation of where Iran and al-Qaeda fit into the picture. No sensible intelligence official would ever emphasize one threat at the expense of another, so don’t look for any dramatic repudiations of the Bush administration. But for the first time since this month’s strange intelligence briefing on Iranian malfeasance in Iraq, there’ll be a public opportunity to discern and investigate discrepancies between how administration and intelligence officials portray the relative threats from Iran and al-Qaeda.

UPDATE: This post initially stated that tomorrow’s Worldwide Threat briefing would be the first since President Bush’s “surge” speech and the first presided over by Democrats since the Iraq war began. In fact, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, chaired by Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), held Worldwide Threat hearings on January 11, the day after the surge speech. I regret the error.