Who is Guilty ? Trump or Israel ?? US agencies 'found' that there was not enough evidence to show that Iran was going for Nuke weaponization

Iran’s reluctance to build a bomb while still maintaining the threat of a nuclear program has clear parallels with the way that the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein handled his supposed weapons of mass destruction program. 

Saddam got rid of his programs to develop nuclear, chemical and biological weapons in the 1990s, following the first Gulf war, but never divulged that to the United States or the United Nations.

** Where Was Uranium Being Enriched in Iran?

There are two main enrichment sites: one at Natanz and one at Fordow. There’s also a facility at Isfahan, which, among other things, is focused on producing important materials for the enrichment process.

Natanz has a hall of centrifuges, which are cylindrical devices that spin incredibly quickly to enrich uranium for creating either the fuel for a nuclear power program or the key ingredient for a nuclear weapon.

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Saddam also wanted other countries, particularly his regional enemy Iran, to think that he still had the weapons. 

US officials couldn’t understand that kind of thinking, and so badly miscalculated by assuming that Saddam still had a WMD program. That mindset led to the intelligence community’s greatest debacle – its false prewar reporting that Saddam still had a WMD program, flawed intelligence which helped the George W Bush administration justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

In the past, the US intelligence community’s assessments on the state of the Iranian nuclear program – developed in the aftermath of its failures on the Iraqi WMD issue – acted as a restraint on the actions of successive presidents, from Bush through Obama and Biden. 

All of them faced pressure from Israel to take action against Iran, or at least to let Israel bomb the country.

The difference today is not that the intelligence reporting has significantly changed.

It is that Trump is now more willing to listen to Israel than his predecessors and is also deeply suspicious of the Central Intelligence Agency. 

And by firing so many staffers at the national security council and conducting an ideological purge throughout the rest of the national security community since he returned to office, Trump has made it clear that he is not interested in listening to the experts on Iran and the Middle East. 

(** Info : To make it weapons grade, uranium ought to be close to 90% purity. It is possible to create a bomb with uranium enriched to a lower level, but it is a much less efficient method. So around 90% is the target.) 

In 2011, the findings of NIE were made public, which slightly altered the intelligence community’s assessment. It said that Iran’s uranium enrichment program was probably being upgraded and could eventually be used to create weapons-grade uranium. 

The NIE - National Intelligence Estimates makes assessments reports based on findings by the US intelligence community regarding various national security issues, including nuclear proliferation. 

But the NIE also found that Iran had still not tried to build a bomb. The 2011 NIE broke with the 2007 NIE by not making a distinction between Iran’s uranium enrichment for commercial purposes and potential nuclear weapons work. Still, the new NIE found that there was not enough evidence to show that Iran had made a decision to restart its nuclear weaponization program and build a bomb.