There Is No Iranian Nuclear Threatby Anthony Gregory, The BeaconMar. 26, 2012 |
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I’m going to keep saying it until the American-Israeli threats against Iran stop. Reuters reports what everyone should know: The United States, European allies and even Israel generally agree on three things about Iran’s nuclear program: Tehran does not have a bomb, has not decided to build one, and is probably years away from having a deliverable nuclear warhead.Indeed, this has obviously been true for years. The official position of practically every authority on this subject has been: Iran has no nukes and is not trying to get them. This “impending” threat from Iran is completely bogus. Yet we see the anti-Iranian rhetoric stepping up, month by month, all toward an increasingly likely culmination in the form of war. Insanity. In the last nine years, we have heard the repeated myth that “everyone thought Saddam Hussein had Weapons of Mass Destruction” and “everyone thought Iraq was a threat.” This is not true, of course. Shortly before the Iraq war, working as an intern at the Independent Institute, in my first op-ed, I warned: Colin Powell revealed a photograph to the UN Security council, supposedly of a "terrorist poison and explosive factory." He also accused Iraq of evading U.N. inspectors by moving mobile biological weapons labs before the inspectors arrived.Even if Saddam had WMD that wouldn’t have justified invading the country, and even if today Iran were on the brink of getting nukes, it would not justify bombing Iran (just as it would be unjustified to bomb Israel or the United States, two countries that have hundreds and thousands of nukes, respectively, the latter of which has actually used them to kill many tens of thousands of innocents). But I recall very clearly many antiwar voices in 2002 and 2003 pointing out that the claim that Saddam had WMD was without any credibility--it was mostly assertions relying on unsubstantiated evidence, such as Powell’s speech to the UN that millions of Americans saw for the transparent tissue of nothingness that it was. Many other sources cast serious doubts on Bush’s war propaganda before the bombs fell. Yet somehow after the war began everything got twisted around. The CIA in particular was blamed for furnishing false intelligence when, in fact, the CIA was probably more reluctant about the war than the administration had been. So now I think it’s important that antiwar voices be even louder in calling out the war propaganda. If war breaks out and and a year later we hear, “Everyone thought Iran was seeking nuclear weapons,” I want it on the record that many of us did not. See also my last two pieces on the topic: “Insinuation as War Propaganda” and “Don’t Fear Iranian Nukes.” |