CQ WEEKLY – IN FOCUS

Nov. 5, 2007 – Page 3312

By David Nather, CQ Staff

Nov. 5, 2007 – Page 3312

Five years ago, Democratic Rep. Silvestre Reyes of Texas voted against the resolution authorizing the Iraq War. He says he suspected, even at the time, that the intelligence had been "manipulated" to portray Saddam Hussein's regime as a threat to the United States.

These days, Reyes, now chairman of the House Select Intelligence Committee, says he has the same worries about the Bush administration's case against Iran. "I'm concerned that the way it's being presented, the way it's being orchestrated by the administration publicly, is different from the nature of the threat as I'm seeing it" in intelligence briefings, Reyes said. "I'm telling members to be on the alert."

Over and over again, the Bush administration has insisted it's not trying to go to war with Iran. Even as the administration imposed financial sanctions against the Iranian government two weeks ago — citing Tehran's refusal to stop its uranium enrichment activities and support of Shiite militias in Iraq — Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice declared that the United States was "fully committed to a diplomatic solution."

TUNING IN: The Senate Foreign Relations Committee has held only one hearing on Iran this year; its House counterpart has held five.
But many members of Congress, haunted by the memory of the escalating rhetoric in the months before the Iraq War, are trying to make sure the rising tensions with Iran don't lead down the same road. For lawmakers from both parties, the goal is both simple and profoundly important: Ask tougher questions about Iran than they did about Iraq.

For the most part, outside experts say Congress has succeeded. That's partly because Congress has become a more aggressive watchdog, they say, with Democrats holding multiple hearings, diving into more of the fine print of intelligence and funding requests, and repeatedly warning President Bush that he doesn't have lawmakers' authorization to conduct military strikes. Senior Republicans with foreign policy expertise have been pushing for greater scrutiny as well.

But the success is also because, as some experts put it, Congress set the oversight bar so low with Iraq that there was nowhere to go but up. "Basically, Congress rolled over and played dead" just before the Iraq War, said Paul Pillar, a former CIA analyst who in an article last year accused the Bush administration of selectively using intelligence to justify the war. "One of the silver linings of our involvement in Iraq is that members of Congress in particular, as well as the press and the public, are more on their toes in asking questions."

Even now, though, lawmakers and foreign policy analysts say there are instances where Congress has not been on its toes.

In September, the Senate, with almost no debate, adopted a non-binding amendment to a defense bill urging Bush to designate Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist organization. Democrat Jim Webb of Virginia said the Senate had been maneuvered into supporting a measure Bush might later use to justify military action.

"People hear 'Iran' and 'terrorism' and they think, 'Oh, I've got to vote for that,' " said Webb, who rounded up 29 other senators last week to sign a letter warning Bush not to read the resolution as a green light for military action.

Congressional hearings have included some witnesses with dissenting analyses of Iran's motives, but lawmakers still are getting a healthy dose of neoconservative views and the official administration line. The evidence against Iran is regarded as fairly strong, particularly on the accusations that the Quds Force, a unit of the Revolutionary Guard, is supplying weapons and training to militants inside Iraq. But the evidence does have limits and uncertainties — whether Iran's leaders are directly involved in supplying the Iraq militias and how close Iran really is to building a nuclear weapon.

Congressional oversight also has been uneven between the House and Senate, and the presidential campaign may have something to do with the disparity. The House Foreign Affairs panel and its subcommittees have held five hearings on Iran this year, while the Senate Foreign Relations Committee has had only one. A possible reason is that the chairman of the Senate committee, Democrat Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, is running for president and is rarely on Capitol Hill.

"The hearings that we've held in terms of oversight are almost non-existent," said Richard G. Lugar of Indiana, ranking Republican on Foreign Relations and a former presidential candidate himself. He predicts the slowdown will continue for about two more months — until the first presidential primary votes are in — "and then maybe we'll hold lots of hearings." Biden's office had no comment.

In Search of Details

Despite those shortcomings, Democratic leaders say they've been making a conscious effort not to repeat what they consider the mistakes in oversight of the administration's buildup toward war in Iraq in 2003. One of their longest-running projects has been to seek more detailed intelligence on Iran, with far more specific questions than most lawmakers asked about Iraq.

Last year, then-Minority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, Biden and other top Democrats wrote to Bush urging the administration to prepare a National Intelligence Estimate on Iran. They also called for the estimate to address issues such as why Iran wanted nuclear weapons, what the consequences might be if the United States launched a military strike against Iran's nuclear weapons program, and how much confidence the intelligence community had in its judgments.

"I was encouraged" by the quality of the questions, said Pillar. Even though the Democrats were in the minority at the time, Reid was able to add language to the fiscal 2007 defense authorization legislation that wrote the requirement for a new estimate on Iran's nuclear capabilities into law. The intelligence agencies currently are producing three new Iran estimates.

In addition, Senate Intelligence Chairman John D. Rockefeller IV, D-W.Va., has set up a staff working group to evaluate the intelligence on Iran and identify any weaknesses. The working group has briefed the Intelligence Committee and answered questions from other senators.

Rockefeller said his conclusion so far is that the Iran intelligence is "better than a lot of people think, and not as good as I'd like." Aides say the main change since before the Iraq War is that the intelligence agencies are more candid now about what they know and what they don't know.

Lawmakers and their staffs are also going directly to respected sources, such as the United Nations' International Atomic Energy Agency, for briefings on Iran's nuclear program. In addition, they say they're trying to ask more pointed questions in those intelligence briefings, rather than simply accepting what they're given. "I think prior to Iraq, the assumption always was that the evidence we were receiving was substantiated," said Democrat Benjamin L. Cardin of Maryland, a member of the Foreign Relations Committee. "Now, we're more likely to suggest that a specific piece of information may not lead to the conclusion that's in the document."

Lawmakers also are paying close attention to the details of the administration's appropriations requests. Last month, House Democrats raised questions about a line in Bush's latest supplemental request for funds to modify bombers to carry new, heavier "bunker buster" bombs, saying the proposal seemed intended to prepare for a strike on Iran.

But senators from both parties who voted against the Senate amendment on the Revolutionary Guard, which was sponsored by Republican Sen. Jon Kyl of Arizona and independent Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, worry that the vote has led the Bush administration down an unnecessarily confrontational road. Lugar called the resolution an "overreaction" that targeted part of Iran's legitimate defense structure, saying "this imprecision seemed unlikely to produce good foreign policy results." Republican Chuck Hagel of Nebraska last month urged Bush to talk directly with Iran without preconditions, warning that current policies could leave the United States in a "dangerous and increasingly isolated position."

And even lawmakers who take a harder line on Iran, such as Democratic Sen. Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, think that Congress hasn't held enough hearings on Iran. "What happened with Iraq was, you didn't have enough hearings, you didn't have enough engagement," said Casey, a member of Foreign Relations. "We don't want to make that mistake again."

The hearings that have been held have exposed lawmakers to some alternative views of Iran's intentions. Ray Takeyh of the Council on Foreign Relations, for example, told House Foreign Affairs that Iran might want nuclear weapons to deter attacks and enhance its power rather than to actually use them, and that its support of Shiite militias has historical roots and probably is not intended to incite a broader conflict with the United States.

But many of the other witnesses have been administration officials or conservative analysts. For example, Ilan Berman, vice president for policy at the American Foreign Policy Council, a group known for its hawkish views, has testified twice. By contrast, Flynt Leverett of the New America Foundation, who served as an Iran expert on the National Security Council staff under Bush and has accused the administration of ignoring important diplomatic overtures from Iran after Sept. 11, is scheduled to testify for the first time later this week.

Leverett says there is little evidence that Iran is sending sophisticated weapons, such as powerful explosives, into Iraq specifically to kill U.S. soldiers, noting that Iraqi militias could just as easily be piecing them together from weapons and ammunition looted from Saddam Hussein's regime after it was overthrown.

The key test for lawmakers is whether they will recognize the limits on the information they have, and whether they will become more cautious or alarmed because of those limits.

At a joint hearing of two House subcommittees in March, David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security, said his group agreed with the intelligence community's estimates that Iran probably would not be able to produce a nuclear weapon until at least 2010, and possibly as late as 2015. But Albright also said there are variables that could affect that estimate, such as how quickly Iran could master the centrifuges needed for uranium enrichment and how much assistance it received from A.Q. Khan, the former head of Pakistan's nuclear program who confessed to selling nuclear technology to Iran, Libya and North Korea.

To groups concerned about Iran's nuclear program, the fact that there are unknowns is itself reason to worry that a nuclear weapon could come sooner than most analysts expect.

"From what we know today, it's probably three years away," said Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi, founder and president of The Israel Project, a nonprofit group that has been lobbying Congress to support sanctions. The problem, she said, is that "sometimes we don't know what we don't know."

There is less debate about the claims by U.S. military commanders in Iraq, cited in the Kyl-Lieberman resolution, that Shiite militias in Iraq are getting weapons and possibly training from Iran that have led to attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq. But the evidence generally thins out, most independent experts say, when the Bush administration and its congressional allies try to suggest that the Iranian leadership is actually directing those attacks.

A military spokesman in Iraq said in July that a captured Iraqi militant and a Lebanese Hezbollah operative had professed close ties to the Quds Force, which had supported some of their planning. Beyond that, though, Kyl said most of the evidence against the guard came from intelligence briefings, limiting the amount of detail he could disclose. As for the top leaders of the Iranian government, the military spokesman, Brig. Gen. Kevin Bergner, said only that "our intelligence reveals that senior leadership in Iran is aware of this activity" — a distinction that falls short of actually directing it.