A classified State Department cable sent by America’s top diplomat in Tel Aviv in 2005 warned that Israeli officials believed Iran’s progress towards a nuclear weapon was nearing the “point of no return,” echoing current U.S.-Israeli tensions regarding intelligence and policy toward Iran.
The cable describes efforts to keep Israel focused on sanctions and tough diplomacy even while “public and private speculation about possible Israeli air strikes continues.” The Israeli prime minister at the time, Ariel Sharon, called Iran “the main threat to Israel” in meetings with U.S. officials, while the head of Israel’s intelligence service described the prospect of Iran acquiring nuclear weapons an “existential threat.”
This dynamic is playing out today as well, which actually shows the farce about any supposed Iranian threat and their quest to build a nuclear weapon. U.S. intelligence has concluded that Iran is not developing nuclear weapons and has demonstrated no intention of doing so, but in subservience to Israeli war-mongering U.S. officials have urged continued sanctions instead of preemptive military attack.
This makes the current debate sound redundant, but even in 2005 it had become a stale narrative. The cable notes that Israeli “assessments from 1993 predicted that Iran would possess an atomic bomb by 1998 at the latest.”
Indeed, Western assessments on Iran’s impending nuclear weapons have been wrong ever since the 1979 Iranian revolution. An Iranian nuclear weapon has always been just around the corner, making calls for war all the more constant. Only in recent years, especially after the experience in Iraq, has U.S. intelligence become firm in their assessment that Iran is not developing nuclear weapons.
If, as the security elements report, Iran isn't trying to manufacture a nuclear weapon, why the sanctions? Under the NNPT, Iran has a legal right to peaceful nuclear power. In fact, fellow signatures of the NNPT have a duty to help a country, such as Iran, to achieve such peaceful nuclear power.
Does that mean that the sanctions are therefore illegal?
I have said it a thousand times and I will keep saying it. There has never been an iranian nuclear weapon program. It is all a lie manufactured by israel to destroy the only country in the world capable of breaking their hold over US foreign policy
Sh*t, who needs a cable for that? Reading/listening to the news gives anyone with 2-gray cells left in their brain the necessary material to arrive at that conclusion.
One niggle, what would be utter subservience would be if the U.S. agreed to a preemptive attack. The U.S. insisting on sanctions, while completely indefensible in and of itself, is less subservient to Likud than an all-out attack. As Glaser makes clear, the Persian Menace is a joint Israeli/American contrivance and has been for years. The Israelis favor the immediate application of U.S. shock-and-awe because Israel, unless she unleashes her nukes, is too weak militarily to completely destroy Iran as a sovereign nation. Obama's (or rather Hillary's) Wilsonian approach, to operate under color of international law, almost certainly encompasses the complete destruction of the Iranian people's infrastructure and sovereignty, but the scintilla of doubt remaining, that the Obamaites won't finish the job and will seek merely to effect regime change without putting an end to Tehran's role as an effective counterweight to Tel Aviv's influence in the region, drives Netanyahu crazy. (This waiting is not all bad for Benjamin though. The smarties over at Mondoweiss have figured out that he's using the showdown in the Strait of Hormuz as cover to steal as much more Palestinian land as possible).
What a sucky choice for the American people, Iranian civilization, and global stability. Naked neoconservative aggression, or progressive neoliberal war for empire.