As an Iranian-American, if I were to walk up to random strangers and state that Iran has no nuclear weapons, People would laugh and stare at me in disbelief. They would say that I am a biased Iranian.
My words would have no meaning and weight because we, as a nation, have been told otherwise. We have grown accustomed to fearing Iran not by our own judgments, but by the judgments of our leaders, which makes what happened last month in Washington, D.C. so strange.
During his first public appearance in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee in February, Dennis Blair, the director of National Intelligence, testified as part of the intelligence community’s annual threat assessment that, “United States intelligence assesses that Iran does not currently have a nuclear weapon, and does not yet have enough fissile material for one.”
Really? Are we talking about the same “eye-rain-ians?”
Iran’s nuclear program and the threat it poses to the U.S. were the most sensational of the Senate’s hearing because it confirmed the controversial National Intelligence Estimate issued in November 2007, which stipulated that Iran was not pursuing a nuclear weapons program.
The controversy that surrounds last year’s NIE estimate resides in the fact that the document was made public at a time when political rhetoric between the U.S., Israel and Iran was seemingly escalating to an all-time high. The NIE document muffled leading U.S. and Israeli proponents wanting to target Iranian nuclear sites with missile strikes.
These proponents included Sen. John McCain, accompanied by his wonderful Beach Boys rendition of “Bomb-bomb-bomb Iran.” John Bolton, the former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations — with his walrus-like mustache — issued a daily demand that Iran be dealt with militarily ASAP.
While still a right-wing candidate, Israeli Prime Minister-designate Benjamin Netanyahu, who in the past has compared Iran to Nazi Germany, literally created his political platform as the leader who would stand up to Iran and crush the Iranian nuclear menace.
The Jerusalem Post, a right-leaning Israeli media entity, is the only news source that devotes an entire section to Iran titled, “Iranian Threat.”
Will the tunes expressed by these sources change due to retired-Navy Admiral Blair’s explanation of the Iranian threat? Not likely.
At the very minimum, war-mongering media opinion makers and biased political figures will now have to take Blair’s report into consideration every time they make an attempt to illustrate the danger of a nuclear-weaponized Iran.
The report does not completely exonerate Iran because the top intelligence chief further states, “Although we do not know whether Iran currently intends to develop nuclear weapons, we assess Tehran at a minimum is keeping open the option to develop them.” Blair also believes that Iran is unlikely to be able to produce enough enriched uranium for a nuclear weapon before 2013.
So what does all this mean?
It means you can disregard think tanks and political pundits as they scream in fear that Iran will have a nuclear weapon by next year. That is, of course, if you would rather believe ideological subjective analysts with political agendas over the Obama-picked director of National Intelligence, who consequently overseas 16 different U.S. intelligence agencies.
Hanif Zarrabi is a Middle Eastern studies graduate student and a columnist for the Daily Forty-Niner.
You’re not as informed on the issue of Iran’s nuclear program as you claim to be. Your assessment of Dennis Blair’s statement on the development of Iranian nukes really is very pollyannaish. The fact that Iran doesn’t yet have a nuclear bomb or enough fissile material yet to build one won’t make me sleep better at night. That merely means that Iran will have enough fissile material to build a bomb and then have a nuclear bomb at some point in the near future. Iran is still working *towards* building nuclear weapons and has been for a long time.
Dennis Blair may very well be wrong about Iran not being able to produce a nuclear bomb by 2013. David Albright, a former IAEA weapons inspector, and many other nuclear experts, estimate that Iran is enriching uranium fast enough to be able to make a bomb by the end of THIS YEAR or early 2010.
What we know for certain is that Iran’s ultimate goal certainly is to acquire nuclear weapons. According to the IAEA’s May 2008 report, Iran has ventured into explosives and missile warhead design. In June 2008, David Albright said that Iran has obtained the blueprints for fitting a nuclear warhead onto a Shebab-3 medium-range ballistic missile. In March 2008, then CIA Director Michael Hayden said that Iran still wishes to obtain nuclear weapons. Even IAEA Director Mohamed El-Baradei conceded in December 2008 that his agency has failed to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.
Regarding the 2007 NIE, it should first be noted that the information in it was current only as of mid-2007. The information I told you about in the previous paragraph on Iran’s nuclear program obtained by the IAEA and David Albright *after* mid-2007. Second, we must recognize the possibility that the 2007 NIE was wrong about Iran. The NIE has been wrong in the past. The 2002 NIE said that Iraq was developing WMDs. We now know Iraq was not developing WMDs. The 2007 NIE could be wrong about Iran in the opposite way the 2002 NIE was wrong about Iraq. Third, the picture painted by the 2007 NIE isn’t actually quite as rosy as you make it out to be. The 2007 NIE did not stipulate that Iran was not pursuing a nuclear weapons program as you claim. It said that U.S. intelligence believed that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in late 2003 and that it DID NOT KNOW whether Iran still intended to ultimately obtain nuclear weapons. Please go to the following link to see an in-depth analysis of the 2007 NIE:
http://thesirenvoice.blogspot.com/2008/05/closer-look-at-national-intelligence.html
You try to discredit Benjamin Netanyahu by noting his comparison of Iran to Nazi Germany. It’s too bad you don’t understand just how accurate that comparison really is. Your forebears’ country has a long history of extreme anti-semitism going back hundreds of years. Iran’s leaders have made numerous statements over the past 30 years calling for the violent destruction of the State of Israel. Please read the article at the following link to learn more:
http://www.americanthinker.com/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/07/shiite_irans_genocidal_jew_hat_1.html
If diplomacy doesn’t completely and permanently stop Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons very soon then a military strike against its nuclear facilities will be absolutely necessary. Otherwise, the lives of millions of Israelis and Palestinians will be in immediate jeopardy.
You’re wrong. It’s actually very easy to point fingers at Iran concerning their development of nuclear weapons. You see, unlike Israel, India and Pakistan, Iran has spent the past 30 years calling for the destruction of another country, Israel. In December, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said that the “Zionist regime” “has reached the end of the line and will soon fade away from the earth”. How else is the State of Israel going to “soon” fade away if not by Iran nuking it?
The fact that more than 25,000 Jews living in Iran IS irrelevant because the mere fact that Jews live in a country does not on its own prove that that country’s government is not anti-semitic. The tribulations of the Jews in Russia under the Czars and Communists clearly proves this. The Jews still living in Iran are essentially hostages. The Holocaust denial officially endorsed by the Iranian government proves beyond all shadow of a doubt that it’s anti-semitic.
The fact that the Supreme Leader of Iran is currently Ali Khamenei rather than Ruhollah Khomeini is not reason to stop fearing Iran. Ayatollah Khameini is just as much a nut as Khomeini was. Khamenei said of Israel, “this cancerous tumor of a state should be removed from the region.” Khamenei also said “it is incorrect, irrational, pointless and nonsense to say that we are friends of Israeli people” and that “they [the Israeli people] are combatants, stooges at the service of the arch foes of the Muslim world…We are on a collision course with the occupiers of Palestine.” So he won’t be happy until both the Israeli state as well as the Israeli people are destroyed.
It was a mistake to tell us in your letter that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is checked by the Assembly of Experts. That fact proves that Gerry Wachovsky was right about Iran rather than you. The current chairman of the Assembly of Experts is the former President of Iran Hashemi Rafsanjani. In 2001, he said, “If one day, the Islamic world is also equipped with weapons like those that Israel possesses now, then the imperialists’ strategy will reach a standstill because the use of even one nuclear bomb inside Israel will destroy everything.” That’s the leader of the assembly that’s supposed to be checking Ahmadinejad. No wonder Gerry Wachovsky as well as millions of other people are so worried about Iran.
Fear-mongering can last only so long.