Tomorrow morning, the Senate Armed Services Committee becomes the epicenter of a prospective war with Iran. That’s because senior intelligence officials will deliver an annual assessment to Congress known as the Worldwide Threat briefing. Over the past several years, the Worldwide Threat has made for a few days’ worth of news at most. Tomorrow’s, however, will be more significant than usual: it will be a public forum for the intelligence community to either support or dissent from the Bush administration’s increasing insistence that Iran is a greater threat to U.S. interests than al-Qaeda.Over the last several months, the Bush administration has contended — as Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns put it two weeks ago at the Brookings Institution — that Iran is “the most disruptive, negative force in the Middle East.” Long ago, this distinction was reserved for al-Qaeda.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=181425