Estimating US Intelligence

I read this piece of stunning news in the Post this morning:

As tensions increase between the United States and Iran, U.S. intelligence and terrorism experts say they believe Iran would respond to U.S. military strikes on its nuclear sites by deploying its intelligence operatives and Hezbollah teams to carry out terrorist attacks worldwide.

Gee, do you think? Look, you can't really trust the intelligence experts anymore, but it's pretty reasonable to assume that Iran would respond to military strikes in some way, wouldn't any nation?

Here's another nugget of brilliance from the same article:

U.S. officials would not discuss what evidence they have indicating Iran would undertake terrorist action, but the matter "is consuming a lot of time" throughout the U.S. intelligence apparatus, one senior official said. "It's a huge issue," another said.
Citing prohibitions against discussing classified information, U.S. intelligence officials declined to say whether they have detected preparatory measures, such as increased surveillance, counter-surveillance or message traffic, on the part of Iran's foreign-based intelligence operatives.

They can't say exactly what information they have that leads them to believe that Iran will respond with terrorism, it's all very super secret and classified. But based on the last five years of intelligence failures, I'd say that they're dead wrong.
Iran doesn't need to respond to any US military action with violence. We need Iran and it's huge oil reserves way more than they need us. Iran doesn't need to respond to any pre-emptive US strike with a few suicide bombers. All Iran needs to do is shut down the gas station for a few weeks, and the US economy will take a nosedive. Whether the economy will rebound or not is something that I won't speculate on since I'm not an economist. But if I were to guess what sort of impact a real oil shortage might do to a country that has virtually nothing in the bank, and depends on a big old US Treasury credit card to keep the nation afloat, I'd be pretty nervous about my financial future just about now.

I don't believe that Iran is close to building a nuclear bomb, the CIA has said that they are ten years away from a successful weapon. And even if they are closer than that, what can we do to stop them? They can hurt us a lot more than we can hurt them, and they can do it without firing a single missile.

These guys who graduated from Harvard and Yale ought to get a refund for the expensive education their parents paid for. Are they stupid enough to think that after this debacle in Iraq, that we can threaten any nation with military force? Iran has defied every attempt at diplomacy because they can, we have proved so inept at the one thing we are supposed to ace, and that is war. Sure we can build tanks and weapons, that's the only thing that America still manufactures, but we can't win a war against a third world insurgency, how the hell do we think we are going to frighten Iran? Maybe if we had some sort of uniformed testing for government officials, before they were able to run for office, the idea of US Intelligence might not seem so silly.

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