Today’s Wall Street Journal carries an important op-ed on Iran by former Senators Charles Robb and Daniel Coats and retired Air Force General Chuck Wald. Last year, the three authors were involved in the production of a notably hawkish report on the Iranian nuclear program (spearheaded by neoconservatives Michael Rubin and Michael Makovsky, and also featuring participation from top Obama advisor Dennis Ross) that my colleague Jim Lobe characterized as a “roadmap to war”. Now Robb, Coats, and Wald are back — and surprise, surprise, they’ve moved even further to the right on Iran. Pointing to “Iran’s shortening nuclear timetable and diplomatic challenges for forging an international consensus on sanctions,” they push Obama to begin making preparations for a U.S. military strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities.

While there’s a lot to talk about in the piece — much of which Jim addresses here – I was most struck by a single line that appears early on: “At its current pace, Iran’s nuclear program will be able to manufacture enough highly enriched uranium for a nuclear weapon in 2010.”

This is a critical claim for the authors’ argument. Although they gloss over the fact that Iran would not be able to immediately produce a usable bomb even after acquiring enough highly enriched uranium (HEU) — for that, it would need a weapons program, and there is no evidence that Iran has had one since 2003 — the 2010 HEU estimate naturally supports their contention that there is no time to waste in dealing with Iran’s nuclear program. Yet the authors do not cite any source or evidence for this estimate.

Which may not be surprising, since it directly contradicts the U.S. government’s latest intelligence on the subject. As I reported last month, Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Dennis Blair told Congress in February that Iran is unlikely to be able to produce enough highly enriched uranium for a nuclear weapon until at least 2013 — a full three years after Robb et al’s estimate. Citing the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), Blair also noted that there is “no evidence” that Iran has even made a decision to produce weapons-grade uranium in the first place.

But Iran hawks have never felt constrained by U.S. intelligence when making apocalyptic predictions about an Iranian mushroom cloud. For them, the clock is always ticking, and Iran is always a year — or less! — from a usable nuclear weapon. As the Forward noted last month, the nuclear timetable seems to get reset with every passing year. In 1995, the deadline was 2000. In 2004, it was 2006. In 2006, 2007. And in 2009, evidently, the bomb is coming in 2010. All this despite Blair’s recent testimony (PDF) to Congress, the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (PDF) stating that Iran had ceased its weapons program in 2003, and Mossad chief Meir Dagan’s own testimony to the Knesset estimating 2014 as the date for an Iranian nuclear weapon.

It’s not hard to discern the motive for these alarmist estimates. By constantly implying that an Iranian bomb is right around the corner, the hawks increase political pressure on American leaders to do something, anything, to stop it. By fostering a crisis mentality around the nuclear issue, they hope to undercut any rational discussion of the pros and cons of military action against Tehran.

Where do Robb, Coats, and Wald get their 2010 estimate? As noted, they give no citation in the op-ed, but the most likely source is an earlier estimate that appeared in an August Times of London report. The Times story claimed, on the say-so of “Western intelligence sources,” that Iran “could feasibly make a bomb within a year of an order from its Supreme Leader…it would take six months to enrich enough uranium and another six months to assemble the warhead.”

Although virtually no intelligence analysts take the “one year” estimate seriously, it quickly went into circulation in the U.S. media, getting dutifully repeated on television by the likes of Greta Van Susteren and John Bolton. Soon after, Ha’aretz reported that the estimate appeared to be leaked by Israeli intelligence as part of a concerted (mis)information campaign, and that the timing of the leak “implies that someone in Israel’s defence establishment wanted to deliver an explicit, public declaration” to Western media.

Are the distinguished authors of the WSJ op-ed similarly serving as mouthpieces of sketchy Israeli intelligence? There’s no way to know for sure, but they may want to clarify where they’re getting their information.

[Cross-posted in modified form on LobeLog.]