As an Iranian-American, if I were to walk up to random strangers and state that Iran has no nuclear weapons, People would laugh and stare at me in disbelief. They would say that I am a biased Iranian.
My words would have no meaning and weight because we, as a nation, have been told otherwise. We have grown accustomed to fearing Iran not by our own judgments, but by the judgments of our leaders, which makes what happened last month in Washington, D.C. so strange.
During his first public appearance in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee in February, Dennis Blair, the director of National Intelligence, testified as part of the intelligence community’s annual threat assessment that, “United States intelligence assesses that Iran does not currently have a nuclear weapon, and does not yet have enough fissile material for one.”
Really? Are we talking about the same “eye-rain-ians?”
Iran’s nuclear program and the threat it poses to the U.S. were the most sensational of the Senate’s hearing because it confirmed the controversial National Intelligence Estimate issued in November 2007, which stipulated that Iran was not pursuing a nuclear weapons program.
The controversy that surrounds last year’s NIE estimate resides in the fact that the document was made public at a time when political rhetoric between the U.S., Israel and Iran was seemingly escalating to an all-time high. The NIE document muffled leading U.S. and Israeli proponents wanting to target Iranian nuclear sites with missile strikes.
These proponents included Sen. John McCain, accompanied by his wonderful Beach Boys rendition of “Bomb-bomb-bomb Iran.” John Bolton, the former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations — with his walrus-like mustache — issued a daily demand that Iran be dealt with militarily ASAP.
While still a right-wing candidate, Israeli Prime Minister-designate Benjamin Netanyahu, who in the past has compared Iran to Nazi Germany, literally created his political platform as the leader who would stand up to Iran and crush the Iranian nuclear menace.
The Jerusalem Post, a right-leaning Israeli media entity, is the only news source that devotes an entire section to Iran titled, “Iranian Threat.”
Will the tunes expressed by these sources change due to retired-Navy Admiral Blair’s explanation of the Iranian threat? Not likely.
At the very minimum, war-mongering media opinion makers and biased political figures will now have to take Blair’s report into consideration every time they make an attempt to illustrate the danger of a nuclear-weaponized Iran.
The report does not completely exonerate Iran because the top intelligence chief further states, “Although we do not know whether Iran currently intends to develop nuclear weapons, we assess Tehran at a minimum is keeping open the option to develop them.” Blair also believes that Iran is unlikely to be able to produce enough enriched uranium for a nuclear weapon before 2013.
So what does all this mean?
It means you can disregard think tanks and political pundits as they scream in fear that Iran will have a nuclear weapon by next year. That is, of course, if you would rather believe ideological subjective analysts with political agendas over the Obama-picked director of National Intelligence, who consequently overseas 16 different U.S. intelligence agencies.
Hanif Zarrabi is a Middle Eastern studies graduate student and a columnist for the Daily Forty-Niner.
3 comments