Winds shifting on Iran (I hope)

Today this article came out.

"Tehran's decision to halt its nuclear weapons program suggests it is less determined to develop nuclear weapons than we have been judging since 2005," states the unclassified summary of the secret report, released Monday.

Is the important part. Hopefully this is a softening of the government's position. For a while, it looked like we were going to try and use Iran's nuclear activities to justify war.

It is also good that people are realizing that not everything needs to be classified.

Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell decided last month that the key judgments of NIEs should as a rule not be declassified and released. The intelligence officials said an exception was made in this case because the last assessment of Iran's nuclear program in 2005 has been influential in public debate about U.S. policy toward Iran, and needed to be updated to reflect the latest findings.

These matters need to stay in public debate so that the reasons for going to war are known and the public is not told "its in your best interests based on data I can't tell you, so just quiet down and go spend money on a credit card"

They also learned from the mistake with Iraq,

This national intelligence estimate was originally due in the spring of 2007 but was delayed because the agencies wanted more confidence their findings were accurate, given the problems with a 2002 intelligence estimate of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program.

which is promising.