Eye on IranFred Kaplan takes readers' questions about future relations and remaining nuclear potential.

Slate columnist Fred Kaplan was online at Washingtonpost.com on Dec. 6, 2007, to chat with readers about Iran's long-halted nuclear-weapons program and what Bush should do next. An unedited transcript of the chat follows.

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Derry, N.H.: Scott Horton blogs for Harpers that a "highly reliable intelligence community source" told him: "The NIE has been in substantially the form in which it finally was submitted for more than six months. The White House, and particularly Vice President Cheney, used every trick in the book to stop it from being finalized and issued. There was no last minute breakthrough that caused the issuance of the assessment." Does this aspect of the NIE story have legs? Do you see this gaining traction or getting lost in the news bustle? If true, the fact that the administration might have expended effort to block such a critical repport is astounding.

washingtonpost.com: The Roll-Out Goes Flat (Harpers, Dec. 3)

Fred Kaplan: (Now I'm getting confused. Have I answered this question already? I don't think so. Sorry if I have.) I've read reports like this, too. I don't know if they're true or not (I wasn't able to confirm them), but the notion has the ring of plausibility. I do know that, for the last few months, the intelligence community spent a lot of time and effort firming up their conclusions. For instance, it's been reported that Cheney was suspicious of the intercepts of Iranian communications, suggesting that the program was halted; he wondered if the Iranians might be playing a game of disinformation. The intelligence agencies went back, looked into it, formed a "red team" to simulate disinformation officers - in other words, checked into whether Cheney's suspicions might have merit. They came back convinced that the suspicions weren't sound. By the way, I think all this back-and-forth is very good. The president - and the nation - should want intelligence, especially on such an important issue, to be as airtight as possible.

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Arlington, Va.: Is regime change the official policy of the U.S. toward Iran?

Fred Kaplan: Not officially.

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Woodside, Calif.: Considering the new Iran Nuclear NIE, it's possible that, like Saddam Hussein, Iran is more interested in the ambiguity about whether they have nuclear weapons than in actually having nuclear weapons. If some foreign policy think tanks applied themselves, could we come up with a new "Godelian" approach (a reference to a famous mathematician, Kurt Godel) to disarmament?

For example: It could be true that a country did not have nuclear weapons (meeting our security needs) but that it could not be proven (meeting their desire for ambiguity). Or is our national security as threatened by ambiguity about whether a country has nuclear weapons as it is by their actual possession of nuclear weapons?

Fred Kaplan: Hmm, is this Godel or Borges? You're right, ambiguity can be an instrument in national policy. Back in the late 1950s, Khrushchev gave bellicose speeches, thundering that the Soviet Union was turning out ICBMs "like sausages" - when in fact their ICBM program was dead in the water. We now know that he feared a US first strike and, since he didn't have the deterrent, pretended that he did. (The strategem backfired when the first US reconnaissance satellites uncovered the bluff.) The problem with these tactics is that they're very risky. The US really did think Saddam Hussein had WMDs - and we invaded Iran. The US really did think there was a "missile gap" in the Soviets' favor - and we ordered a huge ICBM build-up.

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Fred Kaplan: Thanks very much again. Till next time.

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