West recycles old lies to justify attack on Iran

The line peddled by Western politicians and media outlets is that the US and Israel had to go to war because Iran was just weeks or months from developing nuclear weapons.

The White House claimed that Iran could have produced a nuclear weapon “in a couple of weeks”. Financial Times correspondents John Paul Rathbone and Charles Clover warned of “the nuclear mountain that haunts Israel”. And Australian Defence Minister Richard Marles asserted: “The Iranian nuclear ballistic missile program is most definitely a threat to the peace and stability of not only the Middle East”.

The problem is that there is no evidence to support these claims, which have been repeated for more than 40 years by war hawks.

As early as 1984, shortly after the 1979 Iranian Revolution, British defence journal Jane’s Defence Weekly reported: “Iran is engaged in the production of an atomic bomb, likely to be ready within two years”. Timelines have varied since then, but the claim has stayed the same. In 1992, Benjamin Netanyahu asserted that Iran was three to five years away from a nuclear weapon, a claim he repeated three years later, and again in 2002.

In 2012, Netanyahu displayed a cartoon picture of a bomb in front of the United Nations general assembly while claiming that Iran would be in the final stage of weapons development “at most by next summer”. Somehow, Iran has managed to bend the rules of time, being just a few months or years away from going nuclear for almost half a century.

Intelligence agencies themselves have reached different positions.

A 2007 US national intelligence estimate, touted by the director of national intelligence as the “most authoritative written judgments on national security issues”, concluded with “high confidence” that Iran had been trying to develop nuclear weapons, but ceased its program in 2003. It went on to admit: “Tehran’s decision to halt its nuclear weapons program suggests it is less determined to develop nuclear weapons than we have been judging since 2005”.

Just three months ago, current US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, in her opening remarks at a House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, included the evaluation: “Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorised the nuclear weapons programme he suspended in 2003”.

This isn’t an intelligence failure. The Western ruling classes are manufacturing consent for a major war against a rival state in the Middle East by lying. In some ways, it’s a repeat of the Bush administration’s strategy in the lead-up to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Iraq, according to Western politicians and journalists at the time, had weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). US President George W. Bush, British PM Tony Blair and Australian PM John Howard peddled claims that Iraq had stockpiled chemical and biological weapons and was on the verge of developing nuclear weapons.

There was no evidence to support these claims. In the months before the US invaded in March 2003, UN inspectors in Iraq found nothing. The Arms Control Association later noted:

“UN weapons inspectors worked in Iraq from November 27, 2002 until March 18, 2003. During that time, inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency and the United Nations Monitoring, Verification, and Inspections Commission conducted more than 900 inspections at more than 500 sites. The inspectors did not find that Iraq possessed chemical or biological weapons or that it had reconstituted its nuclear weapons program.”

This didn’t matter to Bush and his allies, who were determined to invade and overthrow the regime of Saddam Hussein. A July 2002 memo from the British Prime Minister’s office, leaked to the press three years later, showed that a great hoax was being perpetrated:

“Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC [the US National Security Council] had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime’s record.”

Over the next decade, up to half a million Iraqis were killed either directly or indirectly, as a result of the invasion, occupation and destruction of the country.

Two powers operating in the Middle East are known to have weapons of mass destruction and the willingness to use them: Israel and the United States.

Although Tel Aviv doesn’t publicly acknowledge its existence, Israel’s nuclear weapons program is an open secret. The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons estimates that Israel has between 90 and 200 warheads. Israel is one of four nuclear powers that are not signatories to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (the others being India, Pakistan and North Korea), which means that there is no monitoring of its nuclear program.

Israel is also believed to have extensive chemical and biological weapons programs. Amnesty International reported on the military’s use of white phosphorus, a horrific chemical that burns flesh down to the bone, on civilian areas of Lebanon in October 2023. The group called for Israel to be investigated for war crimes. But this wasn’t the first time Israel had used chemical weapons—it did so in the 2008-09 war on Gaza.

The United States has waged brutal wars to dominate the people of Asia, Latin America and the Middle East for the better part of a century, often involving the most heinous weapons ever produced.

America was the first state to develop the atomic bomb, and later the even more deadly hydrogen bomb. It remains the only state to have used the weapon against civilian populations. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists estimates that up to 210,000 people were killed in the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the US dropped atomic bombs on them in 1945. Hundreds of thousands of people lived, stripped of limbs or suffering from radiation poisoning, for decades afterwards.

The United States has also murdered thousands of people with chemical weapons. The US military dropped napalm by the ton on the people of Korea, Vietnam and Cambodia, burning men, women and children alive. In Iraq, having denounced the regime for its non-existent WMDs, America admitted to using napalm and white phosphorus.

If the US and Israel truly want to rid the world of WMDs, they should start by destroying their own nuclear and chemical weapons. And if they are worried about threats to peace and security, they ought to stop invading other countries.