So it turns out that we have no motivation to go to war with Iran (except that they're, you know, Muslim and anti-American), since they stopped their weapons program since 2003. What the report more or less shows is that Iran has been deescalating a war situation instead of baiting one.

Brian wonders why it took so long for the report to be released and why the intelligence community would defect from the administration. To me, the second point of wondering doesn't seem surprising. After all, the administration has more or less blamed the entire Iraq war on faulty intelligence, something I'm sure gets under the skin of many intelligence professional at the DoD and the CIA. The decision to go to war didn't rest with them, it rested with the president.

Furthermore, I think this really shows how hawkish our entire foreign policy community is on Iran. Even so-called liberal publications like the New Republic in the last year have published essays suggesting a hawkish policy on Iran.* What's more, a lot of people aren't considered serious thinkers in the foreign policy community unless they show evidence of at least minor hawkishness. This seems like a problem to me.