I can offer readers dozens of responsible opinions from Americans and others, which can be summed up as follows: Iran does not have nuclear weapons today, nor will it possess such weapons in the near future. I have complete confidence in the opinion of Dr. Mohammed El-Baradei, the former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, who has told me on more than one occasion that Iran is seeking to gain the know-how to make a nuclear bomb and is not trying to build such a bomb at present. The 2007 National Intelligence Estimate report (representing the work of 16 American intelligence organizations) said Iran had halted work on producing a nuclear bomb in 2003. Tzipi Livni, the former Israeli foreign minister, also said in 2007 that Iran did not constitute a threat to Israel, even if it had nuclear weapons. In 2009, General Ronald Burgess, the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, said there was no information about an Iranian nuclear military program. There are many other such opinions, and I can only select some of them, while the names below were at the heart of the pro-Iraq war cabal. Last month in the Washington Post, a hard-line neo-conservative, Max Boot, called for strengthening the army of his bankrupt country; they want permanent war. Reuel Marc Gerecht wrote in The Weekly Standard, the mouthpiece of the neo-conservatives, an 11-page article in which he was keen on attacking Iran. Similar articles have been written by Steven Rosen from AIPAC and Daniel Pipes, a professional fear-monger about Islam. The vile extremist John Bolton outdid himself, as he once said that Israel had eight days to attack the Bushehr facility. Afterward, he said that Israel had three days before it was too late. He has been making the rounds of Fox News, Radio Israel and the Jerusalem Post, spreading incitement. His pretext is that when uranium tubes enter or approach the facility, this will produce a spread of radiation that will harm civilians. Israel followed him by mobilizing the world to reject the enrichment of uranium at Bushehr; while it is a terrorist state that occupies, kills and steals homes. In last month's issue of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg published a long article in which he expected that Israel would strike Iran during the next year if the nuclear program is not halted. Perhaps this extremist is the best example of the connection to the eve of war against Iraq; on 3 October 2002 he wrote that attacking Iraq would be considered an aggressive act, but that in a few years it would be seen as the “moral” thing to do. On 25 March 2002 he published a 17,000 word article in The New Yorker entitled “The Great Terror,” about Saddam Hussein's weapons and their connection to terror. Although he won a journalism prize for his article, the award was not withdrawn, and everything he has written proves absolutely that he is a liar and a manipulator of the facts. Goldberg has served in the most immoral army in the world, the Israeli army. He was a prison guard during the first Intifada and I do not need to say any more. The same names continue to appear. The same people who in 1999 urged Bill Clinton to attack Iraq, which he refused to do, are the same ones who are calling for an Israeli war against Iran (or an American war, which is better for Israel). The head of the neo-conservative gang, William Kristol, whose late father Irving, the godfather of the movement, passed away a few months ago, heads the editorial board of the leading mouthpiece of the neo-conservatives, and war criminals like Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith have found new jobs, instead of ending up, like Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, before the International War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague. President Barack Obama is not an ideologue. Most likely, he has decided to leave them be, to avoid their hostility, but they have bitten the hand that feeds them, and targeted him with their arrows. Their lies resemble those of the eve of the war against Iraq, and even 30 per cent of Americans believe today that Obama is a Muslim, because this is what the extremist right puts out, to frighten non-Muslims about a covert Muslim who will try to substitute Sharia law for the United States Constitution. President Obama is too smart to continue making the mistake. Perhaps he will change his method after the mid-term elections in November, and go back on the decisions and stances that are indefensible, such as prosecuting the whistleblowers who disclosed the violations of the Bush administration of the law and the Constitution. These include domestic eavesdropping without court approval, based on the Espionage Act of 1917, instead of trying Israeli spies. I fear that I have overloaded the readers in this column, and will stop here. But I will return to the issue in a few days, with a final installment on the centers, organizations and institutions that have become prominent lately in defending Israel, after an international campaign to de-legitimize it. [email protected]
