Opinion

Hey, the CIA promised

Iran today effectively kick-starts opera tions of its Bushehr nuclear reactor — a move hard-liners tout as defiance of President Obama’s sanctions regime.

This follows Defense Minister Ahmad Vahidi’s announcement yesterday that Iran has test-fired a new ballistic missile with advanced targeting capabilities.

Yet despite it all, Washington reportedly has “assured” Israel that Iran is at least one year away from completing a “breakout” in uranium conversion into weapons-grade fissionable material.

The point appears to be to delay pre-emptive Israeli military action against Iranian nuclear facilities until Obama can sweet-talk Tehran out of its bomb.

Good luck with that — though it might be worth the effort if Washington’s timeline was at all credible.

But, according to The New York Times, it’s based on “intelligence collected over the past year, as well as reports from international inspectors.”

This would be the same US band of spies that, over the past decade, has produced one disaster after another.

Remember that 2007 National Intelligence Estimate that declared flatly that Iran had shut down its nuke program a full four years earlier?

Or when White House spokesman Robert Gibbs disputed Iran’s claim to have enriched uranium to 20 percent purity? That was about 10 days before the International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed Tehran’s boast.

That’s when the IAEA said that development “raises concerns about the possible existence in Iran of . . . undisclosed activities related to the development of a nuclear payload for a missile.”

And let’s not forget the biggest of them all — the confident assertion that Saddam Hussein had retained a huge stockpile of WMDs that would be easily uncovered once Iraq was occupied.

According to Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic, Israeli officials — based on their own intelligence — believe that Iran will be capable of building a functional nuclear weapon by March.

And they also understand that this will require action from both Jerusalem and Washington — and soon.

Meanwhile, Israel can’t afford to simply accept US “intelligence” assurances at face value.