WAR WITH IRAN – BACK ON THE AGENDA?

So, is the United States planning military action against Iran before the current White House incumbent vacates the Oval Office in less than nine months time? I have long believed that President George W. Bush would not leave office without taking some form of military action against Iran – either directly or indirectly (via the Israelis). Yet, in recent months, I had convinced myself that war with Iran was now off the agenda, especially in the wake of the US intelligence community’s official assessment that Iran halted its alleged nuclear weapons programme five years ago.

Was I wrong to relax? Does the Bush administration really want to provoke a third world war in the Middle East? Check out what top officials were saying on Wednesday alone (!)

CIA

"It is my opinion, it is the policy of the Iranian government, approved to highest level of that government, to facilitate the killing of Americans in Iraq".

This was the bold claim of CIA Director Michael Haydon, speaking at Kansas University, in what AP’s John Milburn actually described as “the boldest pronouncement of Iranian involvement by a U.S. official to date”. As I have repeatedly pointed out, the Bush administration’s best prospects of engineering a war with Iran, and getting the US public on side, is to pretend that any military action against Tehran is in response to alleged Iranian ‘attacks’ on Coalition forces inside of Iraq. Once again, a la Iraq, we sadly see the top officials at the CIA willing to endorse such blatant propaganda.

PENTAGON

“There is indication that the Iranian support of the Taliban has continued. Again, we don't believe it to be at the same level of which they have provided fighters and weapons into Iraq. But there is some clear evidence that it has occurred."

This was the surprising claim of the chief of operations for senior U.S. military staff, Lieutenant General Carter Ham. Ham wants us to believe that not only are the perfidious Persians responsible for American deaths in Iraq but in Afghanistan too. Two for the price of one! Of course, the thought of Shia-fundamentalist Iran providing support for the Sunni-fundamentalist, Shia-hating, Iranian-diplomat-killing Taliban is so ridiculous and impossible that only a Pentagon official would dare express it, let alone think it in the first place.

STATE DEPARTMENT

“It will come as no surprise to hear that Iran remained the most significant state sponsor of terrorism.”

This was the not-so-surprising claim of Dell Dailey, the State Department’s coordinator for counterterrorism, speaking at the launch of the Bush administration’s annual report on terrorism trends. But what else would you expect him to say? Wouldn’t you expect him to focus on a fantastical Iranian terror ‘menace’ rather than allow journalists to focus on the State Department report acknowledgement that suicide bombings around the world are up 50%, casualties from terrorist attacks are up 9% and injuries are up 15%? So much for the much-lauded, so-called ‘War on Terror’….

Oh, and on a side note, while U.S. officials were talking up the Iranian ‘threat’, so too were the Israelis. And on Wednesday too! On a conveniently-timed visit to the United States, Israel’s Transportation Minister Shaul Mofaz (a former defence minister and chief of the general staff) said Iran could possess nuclear bomb technology by the end of 2008, citing an updated Israeli intelligence assessment (and contradicting both U.S. intelligence and the International Atomic Energy Authority).

So Wednesday really was, for American and Israeli officials, ‘Get Iran Day’.

9-11, NETANYAHU AND AHMADINEJAD

With apologists for the United States having spent several years now accusing Muslims, Arabs, doves, liberals and lefties of either (a) having been indifferent to the suffering perpetrated by terrorists on September 11th 2001 or (b) cynically using it to advance their anti-war or anti-American political agendas, may I point readers of this blog in the direction of the pro-war, pro-American Israeli politician (and former prime minister) Benjamin Netanyahu's rather tactless yet revealing remarks at Bar Ilan University this week?

"We are benefiting from one thing, and that is the attack on the Twin Towers and Pentagon, and the American struggle in Iraq," Ma'ariv quoted the former prime minister as saying. He reportedly added that these events "swung American public opinion in our favor."

Israel is benefiting from 9-11? Imagine if you or I had said such a thing. There would be instant accusations of anti-Semitism. Imagine if another world leader had spoken about the ‘benefits’ of 9-11. There would be nothing but uproar in Washington DC and on Fox News and talk radio. But, as I have repeatedly pointed out in previous posts, there is one rule for the Israelis and one rule for everybody else.

Nevertheless, cynical and callous Benjamin’s remarks may have been, but the fact is that the chairman of the Likud party happens to be 100 per cent correct in his analysis: the 9-11 attacks – and the subsequent so-called ‘War on Terror’ – have indeed benefited Israel strategically and tactically, while strengthening pro-Israeli, anti-Arab sentiments amongst the American public at large.

However, on the other hand, the comments regarding 9-11 made this week by Netanyahu’s Persian bete noire, President Ahmadinejad of Iran, have been anything but accurate or correct.

Now, I have no time for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Yes, alright, he was indeed mistranslated regarding his views on the existence and/or destruction of the State of Israel. But his views on the Holocaust are well-documented not to mention odious and ahistorical, and his decision to host a conference of Holocaust deniers in Tehran was both offensive and embarrassing. I consider him to be a bumbling ‘village idiot’, out of his depth, who has taken the art of ‘misspeaking’ to a new level. I mean, which sane and sensible leader stands in the front of the world’s media and denies there are homosexuals in their country, when images of the execution of homosexuals in that same country are publicly, widely and openly available? (I also can’t stand the fact that Mahmoud, like his self-centred and sanctimonious White House counterpart, wrongly and arrogantly assumes God is personally intervening to protect and guide him.)

Now, in his latest mis-pronouncement, the Iranian president has declared his support for the 'truthers' – the wide array of misguided, close-minded, obsessive 9-11 conspiracy theorists (who tragically tend to draw so much support and sympathy from the world’s conspiracy-obsessed Muslims). Speaking in the holy city of Qom, Ahmadinejad declared:

"Four or five years ago, a suspicious event occurred in New York. A building collapsed and they said that 3,000 people had been killed but never published their names.

"Under this pretext, they [the U.S.] attacked Afghanistan and Iraq and since then, a million people have been killed only in Iraq."

Yes, the United States did use 9-11 as a ‘pretext’ to attack Afghanistan and Iraq. And, yes, as I have blogged here before, studies suggest up to a million people may indeed have been killed as a result of the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq. But for Mahmoud to claim that a building (i.e. the World Trade Centre) simply ‘collapsed’ is an utterly false and misleading statement. The Twin Towers did not ‘collapse’, as a result of a natural disaster, or a bomb, or a controlled explosion or demolition. All of these ridiculous conspiracy theories have been repeatedly debunked and disproved by credible, independent experts from scientific and engineering backgrounds.

As for the names of the 9-11 victims not having been published, I am sorry to say that the Iranian prez is both a liar and a fool. A liar because here, here and here is the full list of all the dead and a fool because – a la his ‘homosexuals don’t exist in Iran’ comments – he must have known that his ludicrous claim could be instantly and demonstrably disproved as soon he made it. So why did he make it? I despair!

It is time, I believe, for supporters of Iran to disassociate from the 9-11 conspiracy theories promulgated by the likes of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and it is time for supporters of Israel to disassociate themselves from the 9-11 cynicism and opportunism articulated by the likes of Benjamin Netanyahu. It’s that simple.

PENTAGON PROPAGANDA

So, we now know that Iranian boats were not threatening to attack the United States Navy in the Straits of Hormuz on January 6th and even the Pentagon’s propagandists have acknowledged that “the threat could have come from anyone on shore with a radio”. Perhaps, hilariously, the radio threat came from the so-called 'Filipino Monkey', who (I kid you not!) has a 25-year history of shouting anonymous threats and obscenities, over the airwaves, at US sailors.

Regardless, the most important and perhaps underreported aspect of this rather disturbing story is the role played by Bush administration officials in Washington D.C., in deliberately hyping the ‘Iranian threat’ and making (unfounded) accusations against Tehran. Gareth Porter, of IPS, concludes his detailed analysis of the Pentagon’s propaganda in recent days, with this insight:

“The decision to treat the Jan. 6 incident as evidence of an Iranian threat reveals a chasm between the interests of political officials in Washington and Navy officials in the Gulf. Asked whether the Navy's reporting of the episode was distorted by Pentagon officials, Cmdr. Robertson of 5th Fleet Public Affairs would not comment directly. But she said, "There is a different perspective over there."

As the Guardian’s Simon Jenkins points out today, in a typically cogent and well-argued column, the current US propaganda campaign against Iran serves only one purpose – to (counter-productively) strengthen the hand of America’s Persian ‘bogeyman’, President Ahmadinejad. Jenkins writes:

“Only one man can rescue the embattled Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, from his growing domestic unpopularity. That man is George Bush. Ahmadinejad faces elections in March and an increasingly disaffected clergy, but he feeds on Bush's antagonism. This week Bush has duly oliged. He has raced round the Middle East drumming up support for his Iranian foe.

“Bush has denounced Ahmadinejad at every turn. He has offered to sanction him, embargo him, isolate him, even bomb him. He has portrayed him as a monster of evil and "leading sponsor of terror". He has showered the Saudis and the Gulf states with $20bn of weapons to confront him "before it is too late". When Ahmadinejad thanked "divine intervention" for making him president in 2005, he should also have thanked God for having first selected Bush. To have Washington as your enemy in these parts is to have every man your friend.”

KEEP WATCHING IRAN IN 2008

Michael Hirsch of Newsweek writes on the magazine’s website that George W. Bush, America’s great ‘thinker-president’ (to quote Tariq Ali), has now fully rejected his own intelligence community’s National Intelligence Estimate on nuclear-weapon-free Iran while on a visit to, of all places, nuclear-weapon-armed Israel. Dubya now sees his own ‘intelligence’ as greater and deeper than the collected and considered ‘high-confidence’ judgements of the (hundreds of) spies, scientists, analysts and researchers who make up the multi-billion-dollar U.S. intelligence community.

As the Newsweek piece reveals:

“In public, President Bush has been careful to reassure Israel and other allies that he still sees Iran, as a threat, while not disavowing his administration's recent National Intelligence Estimate. That NIE, made public Dec. 3, embarrassed the administration by concluding that Tehran had halted its weapons program in 2003, which seemed to undermine years of bellicose rhetoric from Bush and other senior officials about Iran's nuclear ambitions. But in private conversations with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert last week, the president all but disowned the document, said a senior administration official who accompanied Bush on his six-nation trip to the Mideast. "He told the Israelis that he can't control what the intelligence community says, but that [the NIE's] conclusions don't reflect his own views" about Iran's nuclear-weapons program, said the official, who would discuss intelligence matters only on the condition of anonymity.

“Bush's behind-the-scenes assurances may help to quiet a rising chorus of voices inside Israel's defense community that are calling for unilateral military action against Iran. Olmert, asked by NEWSWEEK after Bush's departure on Friday whether he felt reassured, replied: "I am very happy." A source close to the Israeli leader said Bush first briefed Olmert about the intelligence estimate a week before it was published, during talks in Washington that preceded the Annapolis peace conference in November. According to the source, who also refused to be named discussing the issue, Bush told Olmert he was uncomfortable with the findings and seemed almost apologetic.”

The NIE’s conclusions “don’t reflect his own views” because Bush’s views are always based on fantasy and prejudice, rather than on facts and figures. I mean, when was the last time Bush read a book on Iran? Or a report from the International Atomic Energy Agency (from cover to cover)? Or even a newspaper report on Iran’s nuclear activities? Why should we take seriously the “views” of a leader who pays so little attention to facts, figures, numbers, details, policies, reports, etc, and who prefers to go with his gut over his (miniscule) brain?

As the veteran Bush-watcher Jacob Weisberg writes in his excellent and perhaps definitive article – "How Bush Chose Stupidity?" – the current president takes great pride in his anti-intellectualism:

“A fourth and final quality of Bush's mind is that it does not think. The president can't tolerate debate about issues. Offered an option, he makes up his mind quickly and never reconsiders. At an elementary school, a child once asked him whether it was hard to make decisions as president. "Most of the decisions come pretty easily for me, to be frank with you." By leaping to conclusions based on what he "believes," Bush avoids contemplating even the most obvious basic contradictions: between his policy of tax cuts and reducing the deficit; between his call for a humble foreign policy based on alliances and his unilateral assertion of American power; between his support for in-vitro fertilization (which destroys embryos) and his opposition to fetal stem-cell research (because it destroys embryos).”

So, Bush “believes” Iran is a threat, no matter what the evidence (or lack of) suggests. Just as he ‘believed’ Iraq had WMDs, and he ‘believed’ Saddam had a relationship with al Qaeda.

(On a side note, am I the only one who finds the media’s silence, as well as President Bush’s silence, on Israel’s real nukes versus Iran’s phantom nukes truly disgusting, dishonest and depressing?)

Keep watching Iran in 2008 (this blog will be). Dubya still has a year left in office and a year is a long time in international relations.

IS IRAN STILL GOING TO GET BOMBED? – update

I hate to say 'I told you so', especially about an occurrence that I continue to pray will not happen, but the possibility of a war between the United States and Iran in 2008 remains perilously high.

In only my second posting on this blog, in December, I wrote: “So the military option is still on the table, says Bush, and – forget the nukes! - it will be used in response to provocations by the Iranians, say his neocon supporters.”

And what’s been reported today? From CNN:

“The U.S. military reported Monday on a "significant" confrontation involving five Iranian Revolutionary Guard boats that "harassed and provoked" three U.S. naval ships in international waters over the weekend.

“U.S. military officials said the incident occurred early Sunday morning in the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow shipping channel leading in and out of the Persian Gulf.

“The five Iranian ships made "threatening" moves -- in one case coming within 200 yards of a U.S. ship, the U.S. officials said.

“In one radio transmission, the Iranians told the U.S. Navy: "I am coming at you. You will explode in a couple of minutes," the U.S. military officials told CNN.

“When the U.S. ships heard that radio transmission, they took up their gun positions and officers were "in the process" of giving the order to fire when the Iranians abruptly turned away, the U.S. officials said.”

Phew! A close call. But how many more close calls can the region survive? As I said in the earlier post, God help us all if World War III breaks out between the United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran.

ISRAEL: 'MILITARY CONFRONTATION WITH IRAN IS INEVITABLE'

One final point worth considering on Iran and the prospects for war: the Israel factor. Since the US government's National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iranian nuclear ambitions (or lack of) was published on Monday, Israel - also known as America's 51st state - has been at the forefront of the campaign to discredit the NIE's seemingly dove-ish conclusions.

Speaking shortly after the NIE came out, Israeli defence minister (and former prime minister) Ehud Barak said he believed US intelligence had got it wrong and that his intelligence reports suggested Tehran is still trying to develop a nuclear weapon:

"It's apparently true that in 2003 Iran stopped pursuing its military nuclear program for a time. But in our opinion, since then it has apparently continued that program. There are differences in the assessments of different organizations in the world about this, and only time will tell who is right....We cannot allow ourselves to rest just because of an intelligence report from the other side of the earth, even if it is from our greatest friend.''

The new Israeli ambassador to London, Ron Prosor, went further than Barak in an interview on Thursday with the Daily Telegraph's uber-hawk Con Coughlin: "It should be made clear that if Iran does not co-operate then military confrontation is inevitable. It is either co-operation or confrontation."

And Friday's Guardian has this report: "Israel considering strike on Iran despite US intelligence report."

(Plus, Iran expert Trita Parsi, writing for antiwar.com, claims: "Deputy Defense Minister Ephraim Sneh referred to the report as a lie at a recent breakfast in New York, and Infrastructure Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer reportedly "doesn't buy" its findings.")

The Israelis have always refused to believe the Iranian civil nuclear programme is anything other than a covert military programme that poses a so-called 'existential threat' to the Jewish state. They have spent years issuing dire and bellicose warnings, claiming again and again that Iran is just a few years away from the bomb - yet, as Israel's own former deputy national security adviser Shlomo Brom once noted, rather sarcastically: "Remember, the Iranians are always five to seven years from the bomb. Time passes, but they're always five to seven years from the bomb."

The reality is that the Israeli defence establishment has long harboured a desire to carry out a re-run - against Iran - of the country's unilateral (and infamous) air strikes on the Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirak in 1981. And as the Guardian report points out, "they may have been been heartened by the lack of international censure over its bombing raid in northern Syria in September, which may or may not have targeted a Syrian nuclear installation." (It never ceases to amaze me how the Middle East's only nuclear weapons state - Israel - can arrogate to itself the right to attack those of its neighbours who have no nuclear weapons on the pretext that it is protecting the region from nuclear weapons. We truly inhabit an upside-down, back-to-front, black-is-white-and-white-is-black gepolitical universe - one in which double standards seem to be the only standards.)

It is not only hawks in Israel who long for Osirak the Sequel. The neoconservative hawks within the Bush administration in Washington are equally keen for Israel to flex its muscles against Iran, to strike the first blow and to provoke a military conflict in the region which the American can then join (or claim to be 'dragged into'). In September, Washington insider Steve Clemons reported the following development:

"One member of Cheney's national security staff, David Wurmser, worried out loud that Cheney felt that his wing was "losing the policy argument on Iran" inside the administration -- and that they might need to "end run" the president with scenarios that may narrow his choices. The option that Wurmser allegedly discussed was nudging Israel to launch a low-yield cruise missile strike against the Natanz nuclear reactor in Iran, thus "hopefully" prompting a military reaction by Tehran against U.S. forces in Iraq and the Gulf."

"Hopefully"? It never ceases to amaze me how supposedly educated, intelligent, worldly and rational strategic thinkers, at the highest levels of their governments, in self-proclaimed democracies like Israel and the United States, can continue to agitate for an unprovoked war of aggression against Iran, which will undoubtedly make Iraq look "like a leisurely stroll in the park on a balmy Sunday afternoon."

IS IRAN STILL GOING TO GET BOMBED?

One point I failed to consider fully in my first post on this week’s publication of the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran is how its publication affects the prospects for military action. Much of the commentariat, both on the left and the right, seem certain now, as Slate’s foreign affairs specialist 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." Conservative blogger Andrew Sullivan's conclusion upon reading the NIE is equally optimistic: “I do think it removes all likelihood of this administration launching a new war in the next year.” Adrian Hamilton's latest column in the Independent is entitled: “Forget any idea of a military strike on Iran”. And Ray Takeyh, author of the recent book ‘Hidden Iran’ and a self-proclaimed expert on the region at the influential Council of Foreign Relations in New York, says that the report “essentially removes the possibility of a military confrontation between the United States and Iran over the nuclear issue…the military option at this point is not on the table.”

Really Ray?

The miserable record of the past seven years suggests that President Bush and his acolytes have never let anything as insignificant as facts or figures get in the way of their policies and prejudices. As one senior Bush aide told the New York Times Magazine in the run-up to the 2004 presidential election:

"We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

It is only in this context – of an irrational and arrogant administration which prefers fantasy over reality, and ill-conceived and unilateral actions over reasoned deliberation and empirical evidence – that we can truly understand how and why it is that George Bush is able to stand up, in front of the White House press corps, on the day after the NIE is released (the very same NIE which declares Iran has (i) no nuclear weapons, (ii) no nuclear weapons programme and (iii) no foreseeable plans to launch a nuclear weapons programme) and proclaim, “I still feel strongly that Iran is a danger…I think the NIE makes it clear that Iran needs to be taken seriously as a threat to peace. My opinion hasn't changed.” What?!?! (I am reminded here of comedian Stephen Colbert's hilarious and sarcastic denunciation of Bush, standing only a few feet away from the President and the First Lady at the White House Press Corespondents Dinner last year: “The greatest thing about this man is he’s steady. You know where he stands. He believes the same thing Wednesday that he believed on Monday, no matter what happened Tuesday.”)

So, Bush feels no differently about Iran. Nor do the media’s most influential neoconservatives (Michael Ledeen, Michael Rubin, Norman Podhoretz). In fact, one of their number, the Washington Post’s Robert Kagan, gave the game away this week:

“The Bush administration cannot take military action against Iran during its remaining time in office, or credibly threaten to do so, unless it is in response to an extremely provocative Iranian action. A military strike against suspected Iranian nuclear facilities was always fraught with risk. For the Bush administration, that option is gone.”

Notice the crucial part of this statement – no, not the “option is gone” part or the “fraught with risk” part. Notice the key caveat: “The Bush administration cannot take military action against Iran…unless it is in response to an extremely provocative Iranian action.”

So the military option is still on the table, says Bush, and – forget the nukes! - it will be used in response to provocations by the Iranians, say his neocon supporters. It all makes perfect sense. But, what if the Iranians refuse to play ball and ‘provoke’ the Americans, either in Iraq or Lebanon or elsewhere? Simple – the Americans will then do the provoking.

In fact, earlier this year, in February, a former Bush administration official actually suggested that the US government is using the backdrop of sectarian violence in Iraq to deliberately provoke a military conflict with the Iranians. Speaking on CNN, Hillary Mann, the former director for Iranian and Persian Gulf Affairs on the National Security Council, warned that the hawks in the Pentagon were “trying to push a provocative, accidental conflict”. She added that the administration hopes to goad the Iranians into an overreaction so that it would then have the justification to carry out “limited strikes” against nuclear infrastructure and Revolutionary Guards buildings inside of Iran.

In the same month, testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Zbigniew Brzezinski, former national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter and one of Washington’s leading foreign policy ‘grandees’, went even further than Mann. Most stunning and shocking was his description of what he called a “plausible scenario for a military collision with Iran.” It would, he suggested, involve “Iraqi failure to meet the benchmarks, followed by accusations of Iranian responsibility for the failure, then by some provocation in Iraq or a terrorist act in the US blamed on Iran, culminating in a ‘defensive’ US military action against Iran that plunges a lonely America into a spreading and deepening quagmire eventually ranging across Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan.”

As Barry Grey – one of the few journalists present on Capitol Hill to actually record and report Brzezinski’s damning comments – points out, “this was an unmistakable warning to the US Congress, replete with quotation marks to discount the “defensive” nature of such military action, that the Bush administration is seeking a pretext for an attack on Iran. Although he did not explicitly say so, Brzezinski came close to suggesting that the White House was capable of manufacturing a provocation—including a possible terrorist attack within the US—to provide the casus belli for war.”

It is a view shared by (among others) long-time neocon watchers, Jim Lobe of the IPS news agency and Justin Raimondo of antiwar.com, as well as the award-winning investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, who wrote in the New Yorker only two months ago:

“This summer, the White House, pushed by the office of Vice-President Dick Cheney, requested that the Joint Chiefs of Staff redraw long-standing plans for a possible attack on Iran, according to former officials and government consultants. The focus of the plans had been a broad bombing attack, with targets including Iran’s known and suspected nuclear facilities and other military and infrastructure sites. Now the emphasis is on “surgical” strikes on Revolutionary Guard Corps facilities in Tehran and elsewhere, which, the Administration claims, have been the source of attacks on Americans in Iraq. What had been presented primarily as a counter-proliferation mission has been reconceived as counterterrorism.”

“Counterterrorism”? Hallelujah! God bless 9/11. Everything ultimately comes back to the good old ‘War on Terror’. So, even if Iran has no nukes, and the American intelligence admits they have no nukes, the American government still has a backdoor route (excuse? ruse? pretext?) to launching an attack on the Iranians. If they do, God help us all – because even George W. Bush himself has described a potential conflict with Iran as "World War III."

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.