NAMING AND SHAMING THE IRAN HAWKS

For several months now, I have been planning to start blogging. One of my early ideas was to devote the entire focus of this blog (all the postings, all the links, even the name!) to the growing crisis in the West’s relations with the Islamic Republic of Iran and the seeming build-up to a catastrophic Anglo-American war with the Iranians. Until this week, I was one of those who firmly and devoutly believed that Messrs Bush and Cheney would not vacate the White House in January 2008 without first taking some form of military action against the regime in Tehran. Yet on Monday, unexpectedly, like millions around the globe, I breathed a sigh of relief as the United States government released a new National Intelligence Estimate (or NIE) on Iran. Reflecting the assessments made by sixteen different US spy agencies – chief amongst them, the CIA – it bluntly concluded: "We judge with high confidence that in the fall of 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program." It went on to say, "Tehran's decision to halt its nuclear weapons program suggests it is less determined to develop nuclear weapons than we have been judging since 2005." It further said, "Our assessment that Iran halted the program in 2003 primarily in response to international pressure indicates Tehran's decisions are guided by a cost-benefit approach rather than a rush to a weapon irrespective of the political, economic and military costs." With this announcement, the dynamics of US-Iranian relations, post-war Iraq and the entire Middle Eastern region shifted dramatically. For one thing, the probability of a unilateral strike against Iranian nuclear targets has drastically reduced. A number of commentators are now certain that, as Slate's Fred Kaplan puts it, "If there was ever a possibility that President George W. Bush would drop bombs on Iran, the chances have now shrunk to nearly zero."

So, what has the press fallout from this unexpected NIE report been? In the United States, media critics have begun offering up all sorts of reminders of the near-fatal claims by many in the press relating to alleged Iranian nukes – chief among them, Salon's Glenn Greenwald and Editor and Publisher's Greg Mitchell. But where have similar acts of reminding and accounting appeared in our own British press? Can we now expect an apology, or even a retraction, from the ‘Iran hawks’ who have come to dominate so many of the news and comment pages of our national papers? (Don’t hold your breath!)

Take the so-called ‘paper of record’, the Times. How have its writers covered the Iranian story over the past few years? Chief Foreign Commentator Bronwen Maddox declared, “Time is on Iran’s side as it hurtles towards nuclear weapons barrier.” Assistant Editor Gerard Baker described Iran’s “pursuit of an epoch-altering Bomb.” Blairite columnist and pro-war pundit David Aaronovitch decided Iran “is probably developing a nuclear weapon capacity.”

But the highly-paid stars of the Times are not alone in their misjudgements and misreporting on Iran. Writing in the Daily Mail, columnist Melanie Phillips, or ‘Mad Mel’ as she is lovingly known by her critics, accused Tehran of “racing to develop nuclear weapons with which it threatens to wipe Israel off the map and with which it would hold us to ransom.” Writing in the Sun, the then political editor Trevor Kavanagh proclaimed “nothing - apart from unimaginable military action - can stop the mullahs acquiring nuclear power and then nuclear weapons.” Even the so-called ‘liberal press’ succumbed to the nuclear falsehoods and untruths. The normally reasonable Polly Toynbee, writing in the Guardian, asked: “Now the mad mullahs of Iran will soon have nuclear bombs, are we all doomed?” Her fellow Guardian columnist - and Iraq war critic - Sir Max Hastings concluded “Iran is doing its utmost to build nuclear weapons.” The Independent’s young war-hawk-in-chief, Johann Hari, spoke of “Iran’s desire for nuclear weapons.”

Yet the Glenn Greenwald award for “serial fabricators, fear-mongerers and hysterics” has to go to bloviators at the Telegraph. At the height of the Israeli assault on Lebanon, in the summer of 2006, executive foreign editor Con Coughlin – the man who previously peddled innumerable false claims about Iraq’s WMDs, which included linking Saddam’s regime to Al Qaeda – penned a column entitled: "Meanwhile, Iran gets on with its bomb". The paper’s ‘media don’, Professor Niall Ferguson, described President Ahmadinejad’s decision to “accelerate Iran's nuclear weapons programme.” The then diplomatic editor, Anton La Guardia, decided there were “good reasons to fear that the mullahs, behind the guise of a civil nuclear power programme, are secretly trying to build an atomic bomb.” The paper’s pro-war, pro-Bush Canadian columnist Mark Steyn described the (European) view that Iran was three or four years away from having deliverable nuclear weapons as “laughably optimistic.” (No surprise then that some bloggers have now invented the word, "Steynwalling" - defined as a “failure to respond to repeated demonstrations of error”).

The list of misjudgements, errors, inaccuracies, exaggerations, falsehoods, untruths and, basically, lies is – sadly, depressingly, frustratingly – endless.

Yet the purpose of accumulating these quotes, and poring over the past columns and contributions of Fleet Street’s finest, is not simply to mock, point and belittle (amusing and worthwhile as that may be) but to highlight the repeated failure by our media elites, our pundit classes, our own self-proclaimed 'Serious Foreign Policy Geniuses', to convey an accurate, truthful and balanced view of the alleged ‘threat’ from Iran’s nuclear programme. Over the past four years, too many in the media, on both sides of the Atlantic, seem to have failed to learn the lessons of the Iraqi WMD intelligence failure – and the concurrent propaganda efforts by the US and UK governments – and instead have been repeating it vis a vis Iran. It is tragic and deeply depressing that the British public should have to rely on the various and secretive intelligence agencies of the United States government for the truth about Iran and its (lack of) nuclear weapons, rather than our own well-paid and well-read journalists, correspondents and columnists; the so-called ‘Fourth Estate’, which has become "the agency of power, not people". Perhaps this week’s (rare) burst of honesty from America’s spooks will help mark the start of a new chapter in our media’s coverage of Iran. We can only hope.