The
U.S. government may pretend to respect a “rules-based” global
order, but the only rule Washington seems to follow is “might makes
right” — and the CIA has long served as a chief instigator and
enforcer.
by
Nicolas J.S. Davies
Part
7 - Demonizing Iran
The
idea that Iran has ever had a nuclear weapons program is seriously
contested by the IAEA, which has examined every allegation presented
by the CIA and other Western “intelligence” agencies as well as
Israel. Former IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei revealed many
details of this wild goose chase in his 2011 memoir, Age of
Deception: Nuclear Diplomacy in Treacherous Times.
When
the CIA and its partners reluctantly acknowledged the IAEA’s
conclusions in a 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), ElBaradei
issued a press release confirming that, “the agency has no
concrete evidence of an ongoing nuclear weapons program or undeclared
nuclear facilities in Iran.”
Since
2007, the IAEA has resolved all its outstanding concerns with Iran.
It has verified that dual-use technologies that Iran imported before
2003 were in fact used for other purposes, and it has exposed the
mysterious “laptop documents” that appeared to show Iranian plans
for a nuclear weapon as forgeries. Gareth Porter thoroughly explored
all these questions and allegations and the history of mistrust that
fueled them in his 2014 book, Manufactured Crisis: the Untold Story
of the Iran Nuclear Scare, which I highly recommend.
But,
in the parallel Bizarro world of U.S. politics, hopelessly poisoned
by the CIA’s endless disinformation campaigns, Hillary Clinton
could repeatedly take false credit for disarming Iran during her
presidential campaign, and neither Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump nor
any corporate media interviewer dared to challenge her claims.
“When
President Obama took office, Iran was racing toward a nuclear bomb,”
Clinton fantasized in a prominent foreign policy speech on June 2,
2016, claiming that her brutal sanctions policy “brought Iran to
the table.”
In
fact, as Trita Parsi documented in his 2012 book, A Single Roll of
the Dice: Obama’s Diplomacy With Iran, the Iranians were ready, not
just to “come to the table,” but to sign a comprehensive
agreement based on a U.S. proposal brokered by Turkey and Brazil in
2010. But, in a classic case of “tail wags dog,” the U.S. then
rejected its own proposal because it would have undercut support for
tighter sanctions in the U.N. Security Council. In other words,
Clinton’s sanctions policy did not “bring Iran to the
table”, but prevented the U.S. from coming to the table
itself.
As
a senior State Department official told Trita Parsi, the real problem
with U.S. diplomacy with Iran when Clinton was at the State
Department was that the U.S. would not take “Yes” for an answer.
Trump’s ham-fisted decertification of Iran’s compliance with the
JCPOA is right out of Clinton’s playbook, and it demonstrates that
the CIA is still determined to use Iran as a scapegoat for America’s
failures in the Middle East.
The
spurious claim that Iran is the world’s greatest sponsor of
terrorism is another CIA canard reinforced by endless repetition. It
is true that Iran supports and supplies weapons to Hezbollah and
Hamas, which are both listed as terrorist organizations by the U.S.
government. But they are mainly defensive resistance groups that
defend Lebanon and Gaza respectively against invasions and attacks by
Israel.
Shifting
attention away from Al Qaeda, Islamic State, the Libyan Islamic
Fighting Group and other groups that actually commit terrorist crimes
around the world might just seem like a case of the CIA “taking its
eyes off the ball,” if it wasn’t so transparently timed to frame
Iran with new accusations now that the manufactured crisis of the
nuclear scare has run its course.
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