There is much to be welcomed in the new U.S. National Intelligence Estimate on Iran. It discredits U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney and the remaining neoconservatives in the Bush administration. It should significantly reduce the dangers of the United States rashly launching a preemptive air strike against Iran's nuclear facilities while President George W. Bush remains in office. It has been an unexpected humiliation for Bush who appears to have been taken totally by surprise by its conclusions.

The NIE should therefore increase the possibility of the United States starting a serious, albeit cautious, dialog with Iran in the coming months.

Furthermore, the report will embarrass the coterie of leading neocons who have clustered around Republican presidential front-runner Rudy Giuliani, and it could add to their, and Giuliani's, embarrassment and credibility in the long months of campaigning ahead.

There is also a strong element of divine justice in the current furor over the NIE. For the very people who are most outraged about its conclusions and who are most adamant in charging that it cynically manipulates intelligence data for a preordained political goal are the very people who themselves cheered when intelligence data was imagined or wildly stretched to justify the disastrous U.S. invasion of Iraq to topple Saddam Hussein in March 2003.

This is no coincidence. The U.S. intelligence community, led by the Central Intelligence Agency, were first ignored and treated contemptuously by the neoconservative cabal who dominated policymaking on the National Security Council and in the Department of Defense through Bush's first six years in office. Then, when things started going wrong in Iraq, precisely because the accurate and responsible assessments of the CIA and the State Department were ignored, the same political echelon responsible for the disaster hung its own intelligence professionals out to dry in the U.S. popular media as scapegoats for their own incompetence.

But what goes around comes around. The NIE is the first installment of the U.S. intelligence and security community biting back against those who libeled it, trashed its reputation, and rode over its conclusions. We can expect many more such examples in the years ahead.

However, caution must be added: For although the new NIE significantly reduces the dangers of a preemptive U.S. air attack against Iran's nuclear installations, it certainly does not eliminate them. That power remains clearly in the hands of Bush. Cheney remains in office, too, and the convictions of neither man have wavered in the slightest. Elliot Abrams remains the number two man and the real power on the National Security Council. And it remains highly debatable whether U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates would go to the wall, or threaten to resign, if the president ordered him to launch an attack on Iran.

When all is said, however, the NIE restored the elements of caution and independent professional integrity to U.S. intelligence assessment that have been so lacking – and with such dire results – in recent years. As such, it is to be welcomed.