US intelligence on Iran and North Korea has come up short, partly because of distractions posed by war in Iraq and Afghanistan, the two top members of the Senate's intelligence committee said on Monday. In an interview with Reuters, Republican Sen. Pat Roberts of Kansas also suggested the Bush administration goal of seeking North Korea's disarmament may no longer be realistic in light of Pyongyang's recently announced nuclear capability.
"I think we have a ways to go, to say the least, to get to the kind of (intelligence) capability we would want to have (on Iran). But that's (also) probably true as far as North Korea's concerned," said Roberts, chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
Sen. John Rockefeller of West Virginia, the senior Democrat on the panel, offered a gloomier assessment on both countries.
"If we were to have anything, it would be wholly insufficient as to the magnitude of what we face in either of those countries," Rockefeller said in separate interview.
Tensions between the United States and North Korea were ratcheted up on Thursday when Pyongyang for the first time said explicitly it had atomic weapons. North Korea also suspended its participation in six-party talks aimed at ending a two-year impasse over its nuclear programs because of what it called US hostility.
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