What's Missing From the Iran Debate

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, left, and other officials watch a military parade in Tehran last year. (Hasan Sarbakhshian -- Associated Press)

· Does Iran have unknown clandestine nuclear facilities and, if so, how many? Doing what?

· What are the real capabilities of Iran's various weapons-delivery options, particularly its missiles?

· What are the command-and-control arrangements for Iran's nuclear program? Where is President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in this mix?

This dirty-laundry list is one reason efforts to provide net assessments about where the program is have proved so contentious. The last U.S. attempt to produce a National Intelligence Estimate on Iran, in December, led to a comedy remarkable even by Washington standards. Yet we are talking about a country with known nuclear ambitions and a track record of violating international obligations in pursuit of that goal.

Despite the unanswered questions, we have some pretty frightening knowledge about Iran's nuclear capabilities. Less clear are its intentions.

Tehran often claims to want only to pursue a civilian nuclear program. But it also says it wants to wipe Israel off the map. And Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, along with Ahmadinejad, sees nuclear "power" as a symbol of national pride. It's difficult to know what to believe.

What truly raises tensions, though, is Iran's worldview. Iranians have learned to fear the power of others and to believe that they must ultimately organize their world in a way that lessens the power of the states that pose the greatest threat to them. And Iran's essential national security threat has never been Israel. It is the United States.

My humble best guess is that Iran is pushing toward a nuclear-weapons capability as rapidly as it can. But if Tehran were to believe that American -- not Israeli -- military action is imminent, it might slow work on the elements of its program that it thinks the world can observe. Yet such temporizing would only be tactical. Its strategic goal is to acquire nuclear weapons to counter what it views as a real U.S. threat. Iran appears to believe that the United States is not willing to accept the validity and survival of the Iranian revolutionary state.

Of course, Iran does not exist in a vacuum. How Israel and the United States perceive the threat, based on their own historical memories and strategic priorities, figures significantly in just how messy this may get.