Yesterday afternoon, as guests balanced buffet lunches on their knees, one of America's top intelligence official made some provocative and fascinating comments about the current US-Iranian impasse.

What he said was like a thumb in the eye to neoconservatives and assorted other sabre-rattlers.

The official was Thomas Fingar, director of the National Intelligence Council and deputy director for analysis at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. In effect, Fingar is the nation's top intelligence analyst. Previously, he headed the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, one of the few (very few) US intelligence agencies to have mostly gotten Iraq right in 2002, when the CIA and Pentagon agencies were hyperventilating about the threat of Iraqi WMDs. More recently, Fingar oversaw the production of the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate that famously concluded that Iran had likely halted the development of nuclear weapons in 2003.<…