{"id":16076,"date":"2012-08-10T09:23:15","date_gmt":"2012-08-10T17:23:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/antiwar.com\/blog\/?p=16076"},"modified":"2012-08-10T09:23:15","modified_gmt":"2012-08-10T17:23:15","slug":"always-wrong-predicting-iranian-war-and-weapons","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2012\/08\/10\/always-wrong-predicting-iranian-war-and-weapons\/","title":{"rendered":"Always Wrong: Predicting Iranian War and Weapons"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Stephen Walt <a href=\"http:\/\/walt.foreignpolicy.com\/posts\/2012\/08\/10\/voices_prophesying_war\">has a piece up<\/a> at Foreign Policy cataloguing the persistent predictions of a US or Israeli war on Iran, which always turn out to be dead wrong. My favorite bit:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>In September 2010, for example,\u00a0<em>The Atlantic<\/em>\u00a0published a\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/magazine\/archive\/2010\/09\/the-point-of-no-return\/8186\/\" target=\"_blank\">cover story\u00a0<\/a>by Jeffrey Goldberg (&#8220;The Point of No Return&#8221;) based on interviews with dozens of Israeli officials. Goldberg concluded that the odds of an Israeli attack by July 2012 were greater than 50 percent. Fortunately, this forecast proved to be as accurate as most of Goldberg&#8217;s other writings about the Middle East.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>The predictions from the elite media figures and journalists typically occur in tandem with direct threats from Israeli officials, of course. The constant bluster is ironic, considering how strongly it influences Iran towards getting the bomb (Iran has cleverly chosen &#8220;strategic ambiguity&#8221; instead).<\/p>\n<p>But Walt&#8217;s piece reminded me of this timeline from the\u00a0<em>Christian Science Monitor<\/em>\u00a0back in November of last year\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.csmonitor.com\/World\/Middle-East\/2011\/1108\/Imminent-Iran-nuclear-threat-A-timeline-of-warnings-since-1979\/Earliest-warnings-1979-84\">listing<\/a>\u00a0official warnings of an imminent Iranian nuke for about thirty years now. According to western intelligence, they\u2019ve pretty much always been on the verge of having the bomb. Below is a summary:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>1984:\u00a0West German intelligence sources say Iran\u2019s production of a bomb \u201cis entering its final stages.\u201d<\/li>\n<li>1992:\u00a0Israeli parliamentarian Benjamin Netanyahu tells his colleagues that Iran is 3 to 5 years from being able to produce a nuclear weapon.\u00a0Foreign Minister Shimon Peres tells French TV that Iran was set to have nuclear warheads by 1999.<\/li>\n<li>1995:\u00a0<em>New York Times<\/em>\u00a0reports US and Israeli concerns that\u00a0\u201dIran is much closer to producing nuclear weapons than previously thought\u201d \u2013 about five years away.<\/li>\n<li>1998:\u00a0<em>New York Times\u00a0<\/em>reports that long-range missile development indicates that \u201cIran is bent on acquiring nuclear weapons.\u201d Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld reports to Congress that Iran could build an intercontinental ballistic missile \u2013 one that could hit the US \u2013\u00a0within five years. The CIA gave a timeframe of 12 years.<\/li>\n<li>2002: CIA warns that the danger from nuclear-tipped missiles from Iran is higher than during the Cold War.\u00a0Dubious claims from the MeK (now widely believed to be passed on by Israeli intelligence) say that Iran has undisclosed uranium enrichment facilities in breach of IAEA safeguards.<\/li>\n<li>2004: Secretary of State Colin Powell claims Iran is working on technology to fit a nuclear warhead onto a missile. \u201cWe are talking about information that says they not only have [the] missiles but information that suggests they are working hard about how to put the two together,\u201d he said.<\/li>\n<li>2005: U.S. presents 1,000 pages documentation allegedly retrieved from a computer laptop in Iran, which detail high-explosives testing and a nuclear-capable missile warhead.<\/li>\n<li>2006:\u00a0New Yorker\u2019s Seymour Hersh quotes US sources saying that a preemptive strike on Iran is all but inevitable.<\/li>\n<li>2007: Bush and Cheney imply an impending attack on Iran if it doesn\u2019t give up it\u2019s nuclear program. A month later, the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran is released, which controversially judges with \u201chigh confidence\u201d that Iran had given up its nuclear weapons effort in fall 2003.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Yet, in the shadow of <a href=\"http:\/\/antiwar.com\/blog\/2012\/08\/09\/did-barak-leak-new-us-intel-on-irans-nuclear-program\">Ehud Barak&#8217;s bluster yesterday<\/a>, people are still gullible enough to believe these clowns.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Stephen Walt has a piece up at Foreign Policy cataloguing the persistent predictions of a US or Israeli war on Iran, which always turn out to be dead wrong. My favorite bit: In September 2010, for example,\u00a0The Atlantic\u00a0published a\u00a0cover story\u00a0by Jeffrey Goldberg (&#8220;The Point of No Return&#8221;) based on interviews with dozens of Israeli officials. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":86,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-16076","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16076","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/86"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16076"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16076\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16077,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16076\/revisions\/16077"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16076"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16076"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16076"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=16076"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}