The Iraq liars target Iran

[nhboy (Premo)]

Link to original article.

"Christmas did not arrive early for the "Bomb Iran" crowd.

Over the past several weeks, neoconservative hawks were gleefully predicting that the International Atomic Energy Agency's new report on Iran's nuclear program would provide the spark needed to ignite and justify a US or Israeli attack.

Sadly for them, the report did no such thing and the issue has been overshadowed by other stories. In fact, there was so little new in the IAEA report that Iran experts who had been scheduled to do media spots discussing the issue were told not to bother coming in. The Penn State cover-up, the Herman Cain sexual harassment scandal, and now the Rick Perry brain freeze would continue to dominate the news cycle.

This does not mean that the Iran nuclear threat has passed, only that the IAEA did not demonstrate that it has intensified. Yes, Iran is taking steps that indicate clear interest in developing nuclear weapons. But neither the IAEA nor anyone else knows if the Iranian regime intends to develop weapons, how long it will take to develop them or what its nuclear posture would be if it had the bomb. For 30 years, various experts have predicted that Iran would have nuclear weapons in a year, five years, or whenever - with the date always receding into the horizon.

The IAEA report doesn't offer much clarification. As a senior US government official said, in a conference call with reporters: "The IAEA does not assert that Iran has resumed a full scale nuclear weapons program nor does it have a program about how advanced the programs really are."

Of course, the usual suspects claim to know, just as they claimed to know that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction that would someday produce Condoleezza Rice's infamous "mushroom cloud" over Washington. And those same suspects agree about what needs to be done to deter Iran from developing nuclear weapons. As with Iraq, the answer is preventative war. Sooner rather than later.

It's a case of what Yogi Berra called "deja vu all over again".

It is amazing that the same gang of people that lied us into the disastrous war in Iraq (a war that has resulted in 4,471 Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi dead) would have any credibility at all as they seek to get us involved in another Middle East war.

But apparently some people still take these warhawk neocons seriously.

After all, if it weren't for them, no one here would be contemplating a third war in the Middle East, one far more dangerous than the other two. In fact, it is impossible to find a single politician or journalist advocating war with Iran who is not a neocon or an AIPAC cutout (they're often both). And even when not specifically advocating war, they ratchet up the tension by predicting it, as if, by definition, an Iran with or on the verge of developing nuclear weapons means war. (This, obviously, has not been the case with the seven other nations that have gone nuclear since the United States bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.)

The leader of the Iran war claque is Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu who, in the words of New Yorker editor David Remnick, "has most heightened the sense of anxiety" with "a series of leaked reports" that Israel is "increasingly determined to launch a unilateral attack on Iranian nuclear facilities - with or without Obama's assent."

Remnick writes:
The country's most influential columnist, Nahum Barnea, wrote a front-page commentary in Yediot Ahronoth recently called "Atomic Pressure", slamming Netanyahu and [defence minister Ehud] Barak for acting dangerously and without a thorough public discussion. Barnea, who is as connected a journalist as I have ever met, tried to describe Netanyahu's thinking: "Ahmadinejad is Hitler; if he isn't stopped in time, there will be another Holocaust." He continued, "There are those who describe Netanyahu's attitude on the matter as an obsession: All his life he dreamed of being Churchill; Iran gives him the opportunity."

[Gilligan (Premo)]

Only the boy could manage to find the only piece out there that tries mightily to downplay the threat and spin the contents of the IAEA report.


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IAEA Report Alters Iran Nuclear Debate | Middle East | English