Both McCain, Obama exaggerating Iran's nuclear program

The presumptive Republican nominee for president and the leading contender for the Democratic nomination are exaggerating what's known about Iran's nuclear program as they duel over how best to deal with Tehran. Sens. John McCain (R-AZ) and Barack Obama (D-IL) say that Iran is developing nuclear weapons. The US intelligence community, however, thinks that Iran halted an effort to build a nuclear warhead in mid-2003, and the UN International Atomic Energy Agency, which is investigating the program, has found no evidence to date of an active Iranian nuclear-weapons project. The candidates' comments raise questions about how carefully the two have studied the public record on what's become a major campaign issue and is one of the most difficult foreign-policy challenges likely to confront the next president. The issue is also significant because the Bush administration inflated assessments of the Iraqi nuclear threat and the possibility that former dictator Saddam Hussein could pass nuclear weapons to terrorists as it sought to whip up public support for the March 2003 invasion of Iraq. Iran, whose known enrichment facilities are under IAEA monitoring, says it's making low-enriched uranium reactor fuel and has no intention of developing weapons. In a major speech on June 2 to a powerful Jewish American lobbying group, McCain asserted that Iran is actively developing nuclear weapons that threaten the security of Israel and could be passed to terrorist groups. Israel, however, is thought to have a significant nuclear arsenal of its own, and an Iranian nuclear attack on Israel would invite a devastating nuclear counterstrike. "Iran is stronger now than when George Bush took office," Obama said. "And the fact that we have not talked to them means that they have been developing nuclear weapons." The 16 agency-strong US intelligence community said last November in an unclassified National Intelligence Estimate that it concluded with "high confidence" that Iran had halted an effort to develop a nuclear weapon in fall 2003.