The drumbeat for war with Iran is starting up again in Western media outlets, and it is following the usual pattern of promoting false claims to exaggerate the threat from Iran and its non-existent nuclear weapons. One recent report stands out as an example of how news outlets can misinform the public about major foreign policy issues to make military action seem as if it is inevitable. NBC News published a story that was supposedly on Biden’s trip to Israel and Saudi Arabia, but the story was focused almost entirely on whipping up fear of Iran’s nuclear program and distorting the facts about the Iranian government’s ability to obtain nuclear weapons. Now that the nuclear negotiations have stalled, we can expect to see even more agitation for attacking Iran and more “news” reports that pave the way for another unnecessary war.
One of the most important claims in the story is wildly inaccurate, and it creates the impression that the Iranian government could soon be on the verge of possessing nuclear weapons. According to the report, “Iran has stockpiled a significant amount of uranium enriched to 60 percent purity…and could create an atomic bomb in a matter of days if it chose to enrich the material to 90 percent, arms control experts says.” Even if the Iranian government decided to enrich to 90%, which it hasn’t done, it would take much longer than a “matter of days” to build even one working weapon. That assumes that their government made the choice to build weapons in the first place, and that option is one that their government has rejected for a long time. The report doesn’t quote any of these “experts” by name, and we are just expected to swallow this outlandish claim.
Readers wouldn’t know from this report that Iran hasn’t had anything resembling a nuclear weapons program for decades. The Iranian government’s desire to get a bomb is simply taken for granted without any proof. If all of this seems eerily like the propaganda leading up to the invasion of Iraq, that’s because it is the same script for selling a completely unjustifiable preventive war.
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