The new National Intelligence Estimate has taken out the ground from beneath the various liberals, progressives, and leftists who, with varying degrees of conviction, have been predicting that the United States would initiate military action against Iran before the end of the Bush Administration. There will be no war. Senator Biden’s call for Bush’s impeachment in the event of war with Iran is now off the table. Seymour Hersh will have to find something other than the Pentagon’s plans for attacking Iran to expose.

Of this we can be sure – which is more than we can say of the validity of the NIE. Nobody not privy to the classified portion of the report can assess its accuracy. While the performance of our intelligence agencies during the past decade leaves plenty of room for skepticism regarding their latest effort, I will here employ the working assumption that the NIE’s judgments are correct. This means that I accept as facts that “in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program” and that “”Tehran at a minimum is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons.”

While these are the most significant conclusions of the NIE, my focus is on its opinion that Iran’s leaders are not messianic and are instead rationale human beings whose policies are dictated by real-world considerations:

Our assessment that Iran halted the program in 2003 primarily in response to international pressure indicates Tehran’s decisions are guided by a cost-benefit approach rather than a rush to a weapon irrespective of the political, economic, and military costs. [My emphasis] This, in turn, suggests that some combination of threats of intensified international scrutiny and pressures, along with opportunities for Iran to achieve its security, prestige, and goals for regional influence in other ways, might — if perceived by Iran’s leaders as credible — prompt Tehran to extend the current halt to its nuclear weapons program. It is difficult to specify what such a combination might be.

The unclassified version of the NIE does not explain why it was in 2003 — not in some other year — that Iran decided to suspend its weapons program. The key event of that year, of course, was the invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam. Does this explain the timing of the suspension (here I assume, without factual foundation, that the decision was made after the fall of Baghdad on April 9)? Possibly. Iran fought a long, costly war against Saddam’s Iraq in 1980s. With Saddam’s demise, Iran no longer had to contend with its regional enemy — a neighbor that Iran may have thought had restarted his nuclear weapons program — of a earlier decade. If the primary intent of Tehran’s nuclear weapons effort was to keep up with Baghdad, its raison d’être vanished when Saddam’s statue was felled.

While this explanation is possible, I find it hard to accept. Saddam’s regime was replaced by the American (and British) occupation. The Great Satan, with which Iran had been at verbal war since the 1979 revolution and whose president had declared Iran to be part of the “Axis of Evil,” was now next-door. There was a rather considerable body of opinion in the West and presumably shared by the rulings mullahs that Iran — or its Syrian ally — was next on Washington’s hit-list. Another view having much currency at the time was that the lesson to be drawn from Saddam’s experience was that the possession of nuclear weapons was the best way to prevent an American attack. My conclusion is that in 2003 there were far more persuasive reasons for Iran to accelerate than to halt its nuclear weapons program.

Perhaps it was economic difficulties that occasioned the suspension of the program. If so, it could only have been attributable to a sizable drop in the price of oil. But this was not the case. As shown in the following chart, oil’s price throughout most of 2003 was about $30 per barrel, as high or higher than in almost all of the previous five years, during which, according to the NIE, Iran’s nuclear effort was proceeding apace. Furthermore, if economic considerations were paramount, the rapid and sustained upward move in oil’s price since early 2004 would imply that the weapons program would have been restarted. But this is not what the NIE says.

If neither the Iraq war nor the price of oil satisfactorily explain the 2003 halt in Iran’s planned ascendancy to the nuclear weapons club, what does?

If, as the NIE contends, Iran roped-in its nuclear ambitions because the perceived costs of continuing the program exceeded its benefits, the question immediately arises as to why Tehran did not make its decision public. Doing so would almost certainly have quickly reduced or eliminated that scrutiny and those pressures. The answer is that it couldn’t. Both before and after 2003, on occasions too numerous to mention, it has steadfastly and vociferously maintained that it has never been and never will be its intention to develop nuclear weapons.

What could the Iranian government do when its rhetoric (“peaceful purposes only”) prevented it from acting to diminish the “international scrutiny and pressures” from which it had been suffering? The answer: devise a number of leaks having as their purpose the revelation of its decision to suspend the weapons program to America’s intelligence agencies. Such an effort would have no downside: if the U.S. failed to believe the leaks, everything would be as it was before. But if the U.S. were to believe the leaks, Iran’s position would be greatly improved. The likelihood of additional Security Council economic sanctions being implemented would be reduced to near zero, and the chances that existing sanctions would be removed would be significantly enhanced. Iran will not have to stop its uranium enrichment program to get its way.

Machiavelli would approve.