Iranians Unexpectedly Forthcoming

In 2007, just as the Bush administration was hyping the alleged “threat” from Iran’s ostensible nuclear ambitions – and facing renewed pressure from the Israel lobby to go after Tehran – the CIA issued a National Intelligence Estimate that punctured the War Party’s balloon. The NIE, which represents the considered opinion of all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies, averred that we knew with “high confidence” Iran had abandoned its nuclear weapons program in 2003 and not restarted it.

This immediately put the kibosh on the administration’s warlike impulses and deflated the propaganda campaign against Iran. No nukes? No problem – and no U.S. military strike in the final days of the Bush administration, which would have left incoming President Barack Obama with a grim inheritance indeed, and precluded the possibility of peace in the Middle East for many years to come.

Fortunately, thanks to the spooks, it was not to be. Yet Obama, while not stuck fighting a war initiated by his predecessor, nonetheless had passed down to him the same albatross that has ringed the neck of every administration since the early 1960s: the power and influence of the Israel lobby. The Lobby was and is bound and determined to enlist the U.S. in its crusade against Tehran, and under Obama the pressure has been ramped up considerably. Obama himself has played a key role in all this, accusing the Iranians of building nuclear weapons while ignoring the 2007 NIE, which is now undergoing a “rethink,” according to reports:

“U.S. spy agencies are considering whether to rewrite a controversial 2007 intelligence report that asserted Tehran halted its efforts to build nuclear weapons in 2003, current and former U.S. intelligence officials say. The intelligence agencies’ rethink comes as pressure is mounting on Capitol Hill, and among U.S. allies, for the Obama administration to redo the 2007 assessment, after a string of recent revelations about Tehran’s nuclear program.”

These unspecified “revelations,” however, don’t amount to a hill of beans: the Qom facility was revealed by the Iranians, not the U.S., and we have known about it for years. If there were anything to it, you can bet the Bush administration would have come out with it long before now.


Indeed, the only real revelation unveiled by recent events is the fact that the Iranians have been so unexpectedly forthcoming in the first round of negotiations with the U.S., even offering to ship most of their known fissile material abroad to be refined and used for medical purposes. If and when this comes about, it will put what ought to be the final nail in the Lobby’s campaign to drag us into another bloody and prolonged war on Israel’s behalf.