Fear-mongering about Iran’s nuclear program

In a number of posts I have made the point that the drumbeat coming out of Israel about the “existential threat” posed by the Iranian nuclear program, reinforced by the refrain that Iran is run by irrational religious fanatics, and all of it echoed by the United States, has as much to do with Israel’s need for enemies as it does with what is happening on the ground. We have been told for decades now, and especially since the early 1990s, that the Iranian bomb is just around the corner.

This post here on Mondoweiss entitled The Phantom Menace: Fantasies, falsehoods, and fear-mongering about Iran’s nuclear program is a wonderfully well documented account of the history of this tale, going back to a 24 April 1984 assessment in Jane’s Intelligence Defense Weekly that Iran could have a nuclear weapon as early as 1986.