This chain of thought draws us toward another pre-emptive Middle Eastern war and counsels that we risk all the horrendous unintended consequences that could flow from such a war.

But is Ahmadinejad really Iran's decider? If he had personally driven Iran's nuclear-weapons policy, the NIE released this week would make no sense. Admadinejad was elected president of Iran on June 24, 2005. The NIE says Iran halted its nuclear-weapons program in the fall of 2003 and had not restarted it by the middle of this year. During the whole time Ahmadinejad has been president, in other words, Iran's nuclear-weapons program has been halted.

Apparently, the madman did not call the shots.

His predecessor, Mohammad Khatemi, could have warned him of that. Khatemi, a moderate "reformer" (by Iranian standards) was elected and re-elected Iran's president by super-majorities of the popular vote. For four of his eight years in office, his supporters controlled a super-majority in parliament. They never enacted their reform agenda, however, because it was vetoed by the Council of Guardians, which is comprised of six clergymen appointed by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei and six secular lawyers appointed by the Iranian judiciary.

"In January 2007," the Congressional Research Service reported, "an Iranian newspaper owned by Khamenei admonished Ahmadinejad to remove himself from the nuclear issue."

The intelligence community assumes a certain long-term stability among Iran's real deciders. "This Estimate does assume that the strategic goals and basic structure of Iran's senior leadership and government will remain similar to those that have endured since the death of Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989," says the NIE.

President Bush seems to agree. "The NIE talks about how a carrot-and-stick approach can work," said Bush at his Tuesday press conference. "And it was working until Ahmadinejad came in. And our hope is that the Iranians will get diplomacy back on track."

Bush's bet is simply this: The ayatollahs may be immoderate, but they are not irrational.