Bogus Tales of Iran's Nukes Used to Feed US Militarism

Source: Global Research
Ben Schreiner

With seemingly each passing day, the tensions between the US and Iran over the latter’s nascent nuclear program mount.  And with the voices clamoring for conflict growing ever louder, the clouds of war darken.  

As Mark Helprin warns in a January 18 Wall Street Journal op-ed, the Iranian nuclear program poses “a mortal threat” to the US.  As he explains, “we cannot dismiss the possibility of Iranian nuclear charges of 500 pounds or less ending up in Manhattan or Pennsylvania Avenue.”

Jamie Fly and Gary Schmitt, meanwhile, argue in a January 17 Foreign Affairs piece for outright regime change.  As they state: “After all, Iran’s nuclear program is a symptom of a larger illness—the revolutionary fundamentalist regime in Tehran.”  (An anonymous US official was quoted in the Washington Post on January 10 to hold regime change aspirations as well, before the paper later "clarified" the official’s remarks.)

Such frenzied and war hungry rhetoric, however, has not been limited to the standard purveyors of neoconservative drivel.  In fact, dramatically escalating the tensions and sense of fear amongst the American public has been the nation’s mainstream press corps, which has readily abandoned any and all pretensions of journalistic integrity in the service of propaganda.  

Indicative of this is the fact that it is now a common occurrence to have dire warnings of an Iranian nuclear weapons program splashed across the pages of the nation’s preeminent newspapers.  This endless chorus, though, comes despite the fact that an Iranian nuclear weapons program—as does its purported desire to even develop such a program—currently exists only in one’s imagination.  This much we know from the latest US National Intelligence Estimate.  

Nonetheless, the sheer and utter invention of an Iranian nuclear weapons program has increasingly come to be held by the American press as fact.  For as Joseph Goebbels would have it: “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”

Illustrative of this dark axiom at work, we read in a January 12 Los Angeles Times editorial that: “Iran’s development of nuclear weapons [emphasis added] poses a grave threat to world stability and possibly an existential threat to this country’s Middle Eastern ally, Israel.”  In a January 10 Washington Post editorial we read that, “Iran may be feeling some economic pain, and it may be isolated.  But its drive for nuclear weapons continues [emphasis added].”  And in a January 4 New York Times piece we learn that, “The threats from Iran, aimed both at the West and at Israel, combined with a recent assessment by the International Atomic Energy Agency that Iran's nuclear program has a military objective [emphasis added], is becoming an important issue in the American presidential campaign.”

Of course, the hysteria over a hypothetical Iranian nuclear weapons program has by no means been limited to US print media.  The cable broadcast network CNN (i.e., “the most trusted name in news”) has also reported the fictitious claim that Iran's nuclear program has a military objective as fact.