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These findings constitute a damning indictment of the Bush administration's relentless fear-mongering in relation to an alleged nuclear threat from Iran. They demonstrate that just as in the buildup to the war against Iraq five years ago, the White House has been engaged in a systematic campaign to drag the American people into another war based on lies.

Nonetheless, Bush seized upon the claims made in the document about a previous arms program to argue that Iran could revive it at any time, using its civilian program to develop fuel for atomic power plants to speed up the building of a bomb.

"What's to say that they couldn't start another covert nuclear weapons program?" he asked.

Based upon this pretext, he laid out%u2014in terms that directly echoed the rhetoric preceding the unprovoked 2003 US invasion of Iraq%u2014the case for preventive war.

While Bush insisted that the NIE bolstered his case for an aggressive policy against Iran and confirmed that policy's effectiveness, the document had the effect internationally of a political bombshell.

In the first instance, it has apparently scuttled Washington's attempts to push another round of punishing anti-Iranian sanctions through the United Nations Security Council. "Officially, we will study the document carefully; unofficially, our efforts to build up momentum for another resolution are gone," a European official involved in sanctions negotiations told the New York Times.

China, which had reportedly bowed to US pressure at a meeting of Security Council members in Paris, now indicated that its position had changed in light of the NIE. Asked whether sanctions were now less likely, China's ambassador to the UN, Guangya Wang, responded, "I think the council members will have to consider that, because I think we all start from the presumption that now things have changed."

The ambassador of Russia, which has opposed stepped-up sanctions, said that the NIE vindicated Moscow's position. "We have always been saying there is no proof they are pursuing nuclear weapons," said Vitaly Churkin.

While the American president is famous for his lack of intellectual curiosity, the claim that he was informed in August by his intelligence director that there was new information about Iran's nuclear program, but was content to wait until it came out in a published report four months later, is simply not credible.

The reality is that in August the administration was engaged in a major propaganda campaign against Iran, with Bush delivering speeches containing unsubstantiated charges that Iran was responsible for attacks on US occupation forces in Iraq and was threatening the world with a "nuclear holocaust." At the same time, the US was staging provocations against Iran, with the arrest of its diplomatic officials in Iraq. It was then that the White House first announced its threat to brand the country's largest uniformed security force, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), as a "terrorist organization."

The findings of the National Intelligence Estimate are the product of a protracted struggle within the administration and particularly its military and intelligence apparatus. The document's release had been delayed for over a year, reportedly because of attempts by Bush and Cheney to force the intelligence agencies to withdraw findings that exposed as fabrications the administration's charges regarding Iran's supposed weapons program and its alleged support for attacks on US forces in Iraq.

That the final draft not only failed to provide the administration with "intelligence" supporting its claims of an imminent Iranian threat, but directly repudiated the claims made about an Iranian weapons program in the 2005 NIE, is a measure of the extreme tensions and unease within both the military command and the CIA about the prospects of launching a US war against Iran.

Director of National Security McConnell indicated earlier this year that the NIE on Iranian nuclear activities would not be declassified, a position apparently supported by Bush and Cheney. The decision to release some of its findings may have been prompted by knowledge that it would otherwise be leaked to the media, perhaps from within the intelligence apparatus itself.

The differences between the US intelligence estimate and the UN agency's findings, however, were made clear in a statement by an IAEA official to the Times:

"Despite repeated smear campaigns, the IAEA has stood its ground and concluded time and again that since 2002 there was no evidence of an undeclared nuclear weapons program in Iran. It also validates the assessment of the director general that what the IAEA inspectors have seen in Iran represented no imminent danger."

In other words, the UN agency found no evidence that the nuclear weapons program the NIE now claims was in operation until 2003 ever existed.

In this sense, the shift by the US intelligence agencies from expressing "high confidence" in 2005 that Iran was engaged in an attempt "to develop nuclear weapons," to asserting with the same "high confidence" two years later that the Iranians had halted such a program in 2003 may represent the substitution of one phony pretext for war for another.

No evidence has ever been presented to substantiate the existence of a nuclear weapons program. And no description is offered in the current NIE of precisely what activities were halted in 2003.

The threat of another, bloodier war remains real and present. Its source lies not in a non-existent Iranian nuclear weapons program, but in mounting inter-imperialist conflicts and, above all, the predatory drive by American capitalism to offset its economic decline by utilizing military force.

Washington remains determined to assert its hegemony over the vast energy resources of the Persian Gulf and Central Asia. It has launched two wars in the last six years to realize this goal, and there is every reason to believe that it is still preparing a third.