The NIE On Iran

A reader writes:

Am I missing something?  Isn’t a significant part of this story that the estimate is over a year old?  During that year, and certainly until very recently, the administration and its proxies have been pushing for military confrontation, stressing the urgency based upon the flawed 2005 intelligence estimate.  While acknowledging that saber rattling is a component of diplomacy, the deception (and isn’t it deception?) and the level of vigor (talk of World War III) would seem to hurt rather than help in actually advancing an agenda to stop Iranian nuclear ambitions.   Although our credibility in the world is probably not high, at some point this was going to come out, so what was the benefit of the deception?  Was there a belief that we could get sanctions or a war before it happened?  Haven’t we seen this before?

Did Gates have a hand in getting this out?