As someone who has wanted to bomb Iran for nearly 30 years, it’s not hard to understand that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has his own agenda and is using claims of Iran developing nuclear weapons as a pretext. This demonization campaign has been quite long-running. Even in the 1990s, he persistently made this claim, which had no basis in fact. In fact, US intelligence reports at the time clearly showed this claim to be false. The most recent US intelligence report, published this past March, says the same thing. Despite this, Netanyahu persists with his claims, wildly exaggerating them. One of his latest claims is that Iran will build nuclear weapons and distribute them to terrorists.<\/p>\n
Iran’s right to a peaceful nuclear program, conducted with full transparency under the supervision of the International Atomic Energy Agency [IAEA], should be considered a normal state of affairs. Indeed, in 2015, under President Obama’s leadership, the US and the UK supported this agreement, and it was signed. At the time, Iran also stated that it had no nuclear weapons program and welcomed being fully open to inspections.<\/p>\n
When Trump took office in 2017, he withdrew from this agreement in 2018\u2014likely due to pressure from the Israel lobby in the US\u2014plunging everything back into uncertainty. Trump’s “maximum pressure” policy, on the contrary, pushed Iran to increase its uranium enrichment activities. It is extremely interesting and confusing that Trump, having withdrawn from a previously agreed-upon deal during his first term, would now strive to return to it in a potential second term. It would be naive to think that Trump has learned from the past and wants to correct his mistake.<\/p>\n
It is very clear that Israel, under Netanyahu’s leadership, wants to topple the Iranian regime using the nuclear program as a pretext. It is advancing toward this goal step by step, virtually paralyzing opposing forces and preventing them from offering any meaningful response. At this point, it is also moving away from the typical Western approach of preferring “the devil you know.”<\/p>\n
The pretext of nuclear bombs instead of weapons of mass destruction<\/strong><\/p>\n An attempt to bring about regime change in a Middle Eastern state was also made 20 years ago in Iraq. We witnessed the horror created by the Iraq plan, which led to the rise of ISIS and the deaths of millions. At the time, US Secretary of State Colin Powell, in his speech at the UN, said, “Saddam Hussein has chemical weapons. Saddam Hussein has used such weapons and has no qualms about using them again against his neighbors and his own people.” In his presentation, Powell used reconnaissance photos, detailed maps and charts, and even recorded phone conversations between high-ranking members of the Iraqi army. The phrase “weapons of mass destruction,” which he repeated 17 times during his hour-long speech, accompanied by information that intelligence officials had assured him was reliable, became the public justification used by the Bush administration to legitimize the invasion of Iraq.<\/p>\n A month and a half after Powell’s UN speech, President Bush ordered airstrikes on Baghdad. In a televised address to the nation, Bush said this was the beginning of a military operation “to disarm Iraq, to free its people, and to defend the world from grave danger.” US forces, along with their internal collaborators in Iraq, overthrew the Saddam Hussein regime within a few weeks, and evidence of Iraq’s so-called “weapons of mass destruction” was nowhere to be found.<\/p>\n The Bush administration used the credibility of Colin Powell\u2014known for his opposition to war, particularly US military interventions in the Middle East\u2014to bring about regime change in Iraq. Powell later described his UN speech as a “major intelligence failure” and a “blot” on his record. Before he died, Powell expressed his regret, admitting that his sources had turned out to be wrong, flawed, and even deliberately misleading.<\/p>\n If Israel succeeds in neutralizing Iran\u2014and perhaps even turning it into an ally in the medium to long term\u2014guess which conventional power in the region will be its next target? Efforts to demonize T\u00fcrkiye have been underway for a long time, although they are currently on the back burner. A bilateral confrontation in the region would unfold on a very different footing than a trilateral balance; we had better take precautions and fasten our seatbelts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As someone who has wanted to bomb Iran for nearly 30 years, it’s not hard to understand that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has his own agenda and is using claims of Iran developing nuclear weapons as a pretext. This demonization campaign has been quite long-running. Even in the 1990s, he persistently made this claim, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":36,"featured_media":10085,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"gallery","meta":{"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[1138,10802,319,10803,574,288,516,569,812,950,1890,5560,409,1682,826],"class_list":["post-10084","post","type-post","status-publish","format-gallery","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-opinion","tag-benjamin-netanyahu","tag-colin-powell","tag-donald-trump","tag-george-w-bush","tag-iaea","tag-iran","tag-iraq","tag-isis","tag-israel","tag-middle-east","tag-nuclear","tag-nuclear-deal","tag-turkiye","tag-un","tag-war","post_format-post-format-gallery"],"yoast_head":"\n