The former chief of Israel’s vaunted Mossad spy agency, Meir Dagan, has already said that he thinks “an attack on Iran before you’re exploring all other approaches is not the right way to do it.” He has spelled out some of his objections clearly, noting that he doesn’t think Israel faces any “existential threat,” that an attack would “ignite… a regional war,” and that such a strike would only delay Iran’s nuclear ambitions — not halt them.

But today, during a conference at an Israeli think tank closely associated with the country’s security establishment, Dagan further explained his opposition to a strike. He told the audience there — in line with previous U.S., U.N. and Israeli estimates that Iran has not yet made a decision to produce a weapon — that attacking Iran would spur the Islamic Republic into accelerating its nuclear program and push for a bomb. Dagan said:

A strike could accelerate the procurement of the bomb. An attack isn’t enough to stop the project. …

We would provide them with the legitimacy to achieve nuclear capabilities for military purposes.

In a sign of a consensus emerging among former top Israeli security officials, Dagan shares the newly expressed view — that attacking Iran would give the Islamic Republic every reason to boot out U.N. nuclear inspectors, make a “dash” for a weapon, and rally its population to that goal — with other former security chiefs. Former Israel Defense Forces (IDF) intelligence head Shlomo Gazit and former internal security chief Yuval Diskin have expressed nearly identical sentiments. In addition, former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Thomas Pickering has expressed such views as well.

A potential Iranian nuclear weapon is widely considered a threat to both the security of the U.S. and its allies in the region, as well as the nuclear non-proliferation regime. The intelligence estimates give the West time to pursue a dual-track approach of pressure and diplomacy to resolve the crisis. Questions about the efficacy and consequences of a strike — not least the one raised by Dagan today — have led U.S. officials to declare that diplomacy is the “best and most permanent way” to resolve the crisis. Perhaps Dagan’s latest comments will lead to a broader discussion about the possible consequences of an attack on Iran.

Many of Washington’s more hawkish voices have sought to downplay or drown out discussions about a possible military attack on Iran’s nuclear program. Even as the Obama administration has kept all options on the table regarding iran’s nuclear program, presumptive GOP nominee Mitt Romney’s campaign attacked the administration for trying to have an honest discussion of the possible consequences of a military strike.

Now, three Members of Congress — Reps. John Conyers (D-MI), Keith Ellison (D-MN), and Barbara Lee (D-CA) — are introducing an amendment to an intelligence authorization bill that would demand a government report about the possible consequences of an attack. Conyers and Ellison, among others, also used the amendment process to tag the Defense authorization — another big appropriations bill likely to pass — with language stating that Congress was not authorizing war with Iran.

The first public comments by members on the amendment, which has the support of pro-peace groups, could come this afternoon when the Rules Committee meets to decide on its inclusion in the larger bill. The amendment, Section 306 of the new bill, reads in full that:

Not later than 60 days after the date of the enactment of this Act, the Director of National Intelligence shall submit to the congressional intelligence committees a report containing an assessment of the consequences of a military strike against Iran.

The Director of National Intelligence James Clapper has already said that Iran has not made a decision to build a nuclear weapon — an estimate in line with reported U.S. assessments and also the U.N. atomic watchdog and Israeli assessments — and made clear that he thinks Iran can be dissuaded from building a bomb.

But his views on the consequences of a strike are unlikely to satisfy militaristic voices in Congress. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), a prominent hawk on Iran, publicly disagreed with Clapper’s Iran assessments during a hearing this winter. Last year, Graham called on Clapper to resign.

While President Obama, like others, considers a potential Iranian nuclear weapon a threat, this Spring he lamented the “loose talk of war” and called on those who are pushing an attack on Iran to hold open discussions about the possible consequences:

If some of these folks think that it’s time to launch a war, they should say so and they should explain to the american people exactly why they would do that and what the consequences would be.

Instead of hawkish bluster, the Obama administration maintains its options while pushing a negotiated diplomatic solution, which the administration considers the “best and most permanent way” to end the crisis. That’s because Israeli and American experts have noted that attacking could push Iran into building a weapon, and potentially ignite a regional war. Those are exactly the sorts of potential consequences of an attack on Iran that the Obama administration has called for a forthright conversation on, which Conyers, Ellison and Lee are now bolstering. And its exactly the conversation the hawks don’t want to have.

After a massacre of civilians on Friday night in Syria — including dozens of children — which the U.N. strongly hinted was perpetrated by government forces, presumptive GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney blamed the Obama administration for not taking decisive enough action against the Syrian regime.

The plan Romney and his aides proposed to deal with the crisis, however, sounds a lot like the one Obama administration officials discussed with press just a few days before. “The United States should work with partners to organize and arm Syrian opposition groups so they can defend themselves,” the campaign said in a release on Sunday. On CNN this morning, top Romney aide Andrea Saul echoed the call, saying that Romney would “work with our allies to help arm the Syrian opposition.” Watch it:

If all that sounds familiar, it might be because, three days before the Romney statement, that’s exactly what Obama administration officials told the AP they were setting a plan in motion to do. The AP reported:

[T]he Obama administration is preparing a plan that would essentially give U.S. nods of approval to arms transfers from Arab nations to some Syrian opposition fighters.

The effort, U.S. officials told the Associated Press, would vet members of the Free Syrian Army and other groups to determine whether they are suitable recipients of munitions to fight the Assad government and to ensure that weapons don’t wind up in the hands of al-Qaida-linked terrorists.

As for the goal of pushing for a transition in Syria, the New York Times reported on Saturday — the day before Romney’s statement — that ” President Obama will push for the departure of President Bashar al-Assad.”

The Romney campaign “doesn’t want to really engage” on foreign policy issues. Perhaps that’s because so many of his proposals sound like what the Obama administration is already doing — albeit with more hawkish bluster. Last month, Vice President Biden, while criticizing Romney’s “loose talk of war,” noted that, other than the rhetoric, the policies were the same: “Governor Romney has called for what he calls a ‘very different policy’ on Iran. But for the life of me it’s hard to understand what the governor means by a very different policy.”

It is said that, to Washington’s neoconservative pundits, every problem looks a nail, and they have just the hammer: military force. Washington Post columnist and Fox News commentator Charles Krauthammer nicely encapsulated this concept last night on Bill O’Reilly’s show when he said that the U.S. should have sent “weaponry” to the pro-democracy movement that erupted in Iran after the fraudulent presidential elections of June 2009.

Krauthammer said that President Obama should have ramped up rhetoric against Iran during the brutal crackdown on the Green Movement — the distinctly non-violent protest movement born out of Mir Hossien Moussavi’s failed 2009 presidential campaign. And when O’Reilly asked what else Obama could have done, Krauthammer said he should have armed the protesters and order a covert war against Iran:

O’REILLY: But what else could he have done except rhetoric?

KRAUTHAMMER: Weaponry — he could have done a lot of things. Rhetoric is one thing and not to support the legitimacy of the regime. Clandestine operations. Why do we have $50 billion in secret operations in the CIA if not for an opportunity like this? He was hands off. He did nothing and we lost one of the great opportunities in history.

Watch the video:

Presumptive GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney and his ideological comrades have made President Obama’s reaction to the 2009 post-election Iranian government crackdown on Green Movement demonstrators a centerpiece of their criticisms. Romney’s campaign issue page for Iran says Obama “refrained from supporting the nascent Green Movement.” In a Washington Post op-ed, Romney wrote that he would “speak out on behalf of the cause of democracy in Iran and support Iranian dissidents who are fighting for their freedom.”

In reality, Obama didn’t, as Krauthammer put it, “support the legitimacy of the [Iranian] regime.” Daniel Larison has pointed out that, when failed presidential candidate Rick Santorum made the same charge, that unlike many world governments, Obama never recognized the elections. Furthermore, Obama condemned the abuses against demonstrators that June.

But more to the point, one hopes that Romney does not conflate symbolic “fighting” for freedom with literal fighting. Unlike in Syria and Libya, the Green Movement in Iran never took up arms. As Ardeshir Amirarjmand, a top adviser to Moussavi now in exile in France, told an audience at MIT last year, “We do not have any other choice than a nonviolent path toward democracy.” Or, as University of Toronto professor Ramin Jahanbegloo put it, “The Green Movement faces a troubling situation, but it is banking on its strategy of nonviolence as moral capital.” Iranian human rights lawyer and Nobel Laureate Shirin Ebadi — who, like Iranian civil society as a whole, opposes attacking Iran — told ThinkProgress in 2010 that she disagreed with critics who said that Obama should have spoken more forcefully in support of the Green movement in June 2009.

Krauthammer worries that Obama is not doing enough to support Iran’s democracy movement. But it’s perfectly clear that the Green Movement doesn’t want the kind of support — weapons and covert war — that Krauthammer is offering.

Mitt Romney adviser and former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton is no stranger to hawkish rhetoric when it comes to Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program. In January he called for an outright war, telling Fox news “the better way to prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons is to attack its nuclear weapons program directly” and, in February, he fanned the flames of war even further, saying, “I don’t think it’s in our interest to stay out” of a war between Israel and Iran.

But while Bolton and his fellow hawks are welcome to assert their own hypotheses about Iran’s nuclear intentions and how the U.S. should respond, the facts about U.S. and IAEA intelligence findings on Iran’s nuclear program are not a matter for debate. Today, Bolton made a completely unsubstantiated assertion about intelligence findings on Iran’s nuclear program, telling Fox News:

Look, if anybody thinks this is for peaceful purposes there are a lot of bridges for sale in New York and the intelligence on this is unambiguous. The International Atomic Energy information on what Iran’s been up to is unambiguous. This is a charade driven by the Obama administration’s need to find something to pressure Israel not to use military force against the Iranian program.

Watch it:

But U.S. and IAEA reports have never shown claims of an Iranian nuclear weapons to be “unambiguous.” In fact, the IAEA has raised questions about possible dual-military-civilian use nuclear technologies but they have not concluded that Iran has decided to restart its nuclear weapons program after its suspension in 2003.

And Israeli and U.S. intelligence reports concur with the assessment that there is no “unambiguous” evidence that Iran has restarted its nuclear weapons program. In February, Director of National Intelligence told the Senate Armed Services Committee that he had doubts about Iranian intentions to build a nuclear weapon and that “they’re keeping themselves in a position to make that decision but there are certain things they have not done for some time.”

The Associated Press reported in March that, “Several senior Israeli officials who spoke in recent days to The Associated Press said Israel has come around to the U.S. view that no final decision to build a bomb has been made by Iran.”

Furthermore, Bolton’s claim that the U.S. is only playing for time in negotiations with Iran is contradicted by President Obama’s unambiguous commitment to “preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon” and assertion that it was “unacceptable for Iran to have a nuclear weapon.” But while the president has outlined the threat an Iranian nuclear weapon poses to both the security of the U.S. and its allies in the region, the Obama administration believes that diplomacy is the “best and most permanent way” to resolve the crisis.

But all this probably won’t stop Romney from seeking out Bolton’s advice. “I look forward to consulting with him as we campaign to restore America’s standing abroad and ensure that this century is an American Century,” Romney said of Bolton back in January.

This morning on MSNBC, former Secretary of State Colin Powell criticized Mitt Romney’s foreign policy team for being “quite far to the right.” Romney has been “catching a lot of heck from the more regular GOP foreign affairs community. We’re kind of taken aback by it,” Powell said.

Later on the same network, the retried four-star U.S. Army general, referring to Romney’s claim that Russia is America’s “number one geopolitical foe,” had some advice for the presumptive GOP presidential nominee — cut out the hyperbole when talking about foreign policy:

POWELL: I think he really needs to not just accept these cataclysmic sort of pronouncements. I think he really needs to think carefully about these statements because they’re now on the wall for people to see. … Let’s not go creating enemies where none yet exist. Does this mean that we should trust Putin or Medvedev? No. Let’s be mature people and look at the reality of the situation and not find ways to see if we can hyperbolize the situation.

Host Andrea Mitchell noted that Romney is attacking President Obama on his Iran policy, saying he’s “showing weakness.”

“Well I don’t know what Mr. Romney would prefer to do,” Powell said, “The fact of the matter is we need a negotiated solution and the only way you can get a negotiated solution is to talk to the other side.” Watch the clip:

Vice President Biden also recently chastised Romney for his militaristic rhetoric. “[L]oose talk about a war has incredibly negative consequences in our efforts to end Iran’s nuclear quest,” he said, adding that if war with Iran is “what governor Romney means by a ‘very different policy’ then he should tell the American people.”

And if Powell doesn’t know “what Mr. Romney would prefer to do” on Iran, as he said today on MSNBC, neither does anyone else. Romney has no real policy on Iran that differs much from the current administration’s approach. The New York Times reported recently that “when pressed on how, exactly, his strategy would differ from Mr. Obama’s, Mr. Romney had a hard time responding.”

In an announcement that could signal a breakthrough in resolving suspicions over Iran’s nuclear program, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Chief Yukiya Amano announced today that a deal has been reached allowing IAEA inspectors to restart a long-stalled probe into Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Amano, whose announcement comes a day before Iran and the P5+1 begin talks in Baghdad over Iran’s disputed uranium enrichment, is understood to have secured IAEA inspectors access to the Parchin military complex, where the agency believes Iran tested a nuclear weapon triggering device nine years. Iran has dismissed those claims and denied inspectors access, telling the IAEA that the military complex was sufficiently inspected by the agency in 2005.

Amano acknowledged that “some differences” remain with Iranian chief nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili but that the “decision was made to conclude and sign the agreement.”

The agreement is likely to influence the upcoming negotiations in Baghdad at which Iran is expected to seek an easing of economic sanctions — including an embargo on oil deals starting July 1 and new banking restrictions.

Indeed, the new agreement, which is expected to allow inspectors access to previously closed off sites, may pressure the U.S. and other U.N. Security Council countries to offer some form of concessions in exchange for the new access to suspected nuclear sites.

The U.N. has called for a full suspension of Iranian uranium enrichment during the negotiation process but there is growing speculation that the P5+1 may accept low-uranium enrichment — under 20 percent — if inspectors are allowed access to all suspected sites.

The possibility of a brokered agreement in which IAEA inspectors gain access to all facilities and Western powers either postpone or cancel upcoming sanctions in exchange for Iran reducing its nuclear enrichment to under 20-percent could offer a face-saving outcome for both the Iranian government — which could claim victory for its domestic audience — and the U.S. and its allies.

However, Robert Wood, the U.S. envoy to the IAEA, expressed skepticism in a statement, saying Washington remained “concerned by the urgent obligation for Iran to take concrete steps to cooperate fully with the verification efforts of the IAEA, based on IAEA verification practices.”

While the U.S. and other Security Council member countries may be more open to a negotiated agreement, President Obama has committed to “preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon” and emphasized that it is “unacceptable for Iran to have a nuclear weapon.” IAEA inspectors have raised questions about possible dual-military-civilian use nuclear technologies but they have not concluded that Iran has decided to restart its nuclear weapons program after its suspension in 2003.

A new poll conducted by the Pew Global Attitudes Project finds that 63 percent of respondents in the U.S. “would turn to military force to prevent Iran from going nuclear.” But the pollsters questions contain unproven assumptions about the effectiveness of military strikes and suggest that failure to act militarily may hasten an Iranian nuclear weapon.

Respondents were asked to choose [PDF, page 27] between “preventing Iran from developing nuclear weapons, even if it means taking military action,” or “avoiding a military conflict with Iran, even if means Iran may develop nuclear weapons.” Built into these questions is the assumption that military action can prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons or, conversely, that the lack of military action may ensure an Iranian nuclear weapon. Policy experts in Israel and the U.S. have consistently challenged this understanding of the Iranian nuclear showdown.

Last month, former Israeli internal security chief Yuval Diskin warned that :

[Israel's leadership] presents a false view to the public on the Iranian bomb, as though acting against Iran would prevent a nuclear bomb. But attacking Iran will encourage them to develop a bomb all the faster.

Indeed, the pollsters at Pew could take some lessons from Diskin about avoiding false trade-offs between bombing Iran and preventing an Iranian nuclear weapon. They could also have listened to Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Dan Meridor who observed that “an attack on Iran wouldn’t add anything to our security.” Or they could have watched former Israeli spy chief Meir Dagan’s warnings on 60 Minutes that an attack on Iran would “ignite regional war” and “there’s no military attack that can halt the Iranian nuclear project. It could only delay it.”

In the U.S., Secretary of State Hillary Clinton emphasized that “giving diplomacy a chance” is the best “way forward,” and former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. (appointed by George H.W. Bush) Thomas Pickering warned that “[A military strike] has a very high propensity, in my view, of driving Iran in the direction of openly declaring and deciding [...] to make a nuclear weapon.”

Finally, and from perhaps the least political source, the Congressional Research Service (CRS) found that “an attack could have considerable regional and global security, political, and economic repercussions” but “it is unclear what the ultimate effect of a strike would be on the likelihood of Iran acquiring nuclear weapons.”

This uncertainty was nowhere to be found in Pew’s questions which posed a clear tradeoff between taking military action to destroy Iran’s nuclear program and “avoiding a military conflict” at the expense of Iran acquiring a nuclear weapon. This tradeoff presented to poll respondents fails to take into account the overwhelming evidence that no such trade-off exists. President Obama has committed to “preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon” and said it was “unacceptable for Iran to have a nuclear weapon.” But the willingness of politicians and pollsters to portray a tradeoff between military action and Iran’s acquisition of a nuclear weapon promotes an inaccurate set of policy choices which, ultimately, may undermine efforts to resolve the Iranian nuclear crisis.