On the Chris Matthews Show today, NBC’s Howard Fineman revealed that the intelligence community will release “three different reports” in upcoming weeks to “slow down” the administration’s current drumbeat for war with Iran:

The intelligence community over the next few months is going to come out with three different reports on Iran about internal political problems of Iran, about the economy, and about their nuclear capability.

Those are going to be key to decide what the Bush administration is going to do, and it’s the intelligence community I think trying to slow down what the president, most particularly the vice president, want to do in Iran.

Watch it:

The intelligence community’s warning against war with Iran echo its warnings prior to the invasion of Iraq. Pre-war intelligence forewarned that occupying Iraq could be a “long, difficult and probably turbulent challenge” and would “accelerate” regional terrorism.

Similarly, the administration “ignore[d] the intelligence community’s belief that the militant Islamist al-Qaida and Saddam’s secular dictatorship were unlikely allies,” instead setting up an “alternative intelligence” shop to disseminate false information about Hussein. Mohamad El Baradei of the International Atomic Energy Agency has also warned that pre-Iraq failures are being repeated with respect to Iran.