Earlier this week, public opinion and mainly left-wing media circles in Europe breathed a big sigh of relief mixed with Schadenfreude after learning that the U.S. intelligence community now believes that Iran stopped its nuclear weapons program back in 2003. “Relief” because 1) no one in Europe wants the Mullahs to get their hands on nuclear weapons, and 2) no one wants the U.S. to launch military strikes against Iran to prevent that from happening either; “Schadenfreude” because 1) the NIE seems to weaken the Bush administration’s aggressive rhetoric as to why Iran is a major international security threat, and 2) because, like in the case of Iraq’s WMD programs, people get the impression that there is once again a clear disconnect between what the (U.S.) intelligence community knows and what the Bush administration wants the rest of the world to believe.

For Europeans, both the content and timing of this week’s NIE were even more surprising as many regular citizens, journalists, and even security experts seemed to believe that a U.S. attack on Iran was imminent, or at least likely to happen before Bush leaves office in January 2009. It is rather ironic that these folks tend to be the same people who refuse to acknowledge that the U.S. “surge” has yielded remarkable security progress in Baghdad and elsewhere in Iraq.

After learning about the NIE, governments in Germany, the UK, and France--the three European powers involved in the on-going EU3 + 3 nuclear negotiations with Iran--were quick to stress the need to keep the international pressure on Tehran, raising the specter of a new sanctions regime imposed by the UN Security Council. In this context, it is interesting that Germany’s conservative daily Die Welt not only refused to downplay the security threat posed by Iran but also raised questions as to whether U.S. and European intelligence services are on the same page when it comes to assessing what Tehran is really up to:

“[As a result of intelligence failures regarding Iraq], the US intelligence services are more defensive than their European counterparts, who aren’t yet completely convinced that Iran put a freeze on its atomic weapons program in 2003. But at least this can be said: If the US intelligence services don’t come up with any reliable information about an Iranian bomb in the next few months, the Mullahs won’t be attacked militarily under this US president.”