Bush’s inflammatory and inaccurate accusations against Iran

On Wednesday– the same day Dick Cheney was blowing off the recent, much less alarmist National Intelligence Estimate on Iran– our president was making an audiotape to be broadcast into Iran in which he claimed, fallaciously, that Iran has “declared they want a nuclear weapon to destroy people” and that the Islamic Republic could be hiding a secret nuclear weapons program.
McClatchy’s Jonathan Landay has written an excellent short analysis of this issue. Over at the WaPo, Robin Wright notes the escalatory potential of Bush’s utterance. She quotes Iran specialist Suzanne Maloney, who worked at the State Department until recently, as saying that “The bellicose rhetoric from one side only produces the same from the other.” Bush’s rhetorical escalation has also been accompanied by further moves to tighten the sanction against Iranian financial institutions.
Bush seems to be in a strange (and to me very scary) kind of gung-ho-ish mood these days, one that seems far removed from the grim realities of a US military that is tautly over-stretched between Iraq and Afghanistan, a US diplomacy that is facing vast new problems, including crucally from its own NATO allies, and a US economy that is sputtering very seriously and threatened with further, even more explosive breakdown.
I am really wondering what is causing his present mood of apparent elation. Worrying, too, about what disasters it might lead us all into.
By the way, happy Nowruz, happy Easter, and happy Passover– oops, sorry, make that Purim–, everyone. (If you celebrate a feast at this time of year that I haven’t mentioned, happy that, too. As for us Quakers, we don’t have a liturgical calendar so we just get to appreciate the passage of the seasons on this beautiful earth. May we find a way to save it, and ourselves– including from any further terrible wars.)

5 thoughts on “Bush’s inflammatory and inaccurate accusations against Iran”

  1. I know I’m nit-picking, but the Jewish festival presently occurring is not Passover but Purim. Passover this year begins on 20th April.
    And to you, since you celebrate the passage of the seasons, I hope that this spring will bring you peace and hope.

  2. With friends like Jonathan Landay, who needs enemies?
    Bush misstates Iran’s position on desire for nuclear weapons
    Landay did get that part right.
    Iran’s position: “The Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has issued the fatwa that the production, stockpiling, and use of nuclear weapons are forbidden under Islam and that the Islamic Republic of Iran shall never acquire these weapons.”
    Ahmadinejad: “We are opposed to nuclear weapons. We think it has been developed just to kill human beings. It is not in the service of human beings. For that reason, last year in my address to the U.N. General Assembly, I suggested that a committee should be set up in order to disarm all the countries that possess nuclear weapons.”
    “Israel must be wiped off the map,” although some experts disputed the translation
    The translation has only been “disputed” by Zionist sympathizers. The meaning is clear.
    Juan Cole: “Ahmadinejad made an analogy to Khomeini’s determination and success in getting rid of the Shah’s government, which Khomeini had said “must go” (az bain bayad berad). Then Ahmadinejad defined Zionism not as an Arabi-Israeli national struggle but as a Western plot to divide the world of Islam with Israel as the pivot of this plan.
    “The phrase he then used as I read it is “The Imam said that this regime occupying Jerusalem (een rezhim-e ishghalgar-e qods) must [vanish from] the page of time (bayad az safheh-ye ruzgar mahv shavad).”
    “Ahmadinejad was not making a threat, he was quoting a saying of Khomeini and urging that pro-Palestinian activists in Iran not give up hope– that the occupation of Jerusalem was no more a continued inevitability than had been the hegemony of the Shah’s government.
    “Whatever this quotation from a decades-old speech of Khomeini may have meant, Ahmadinejad did not say that ‘Israel must be wiped off the map’ with the implication that phrase has of Nazi-style extermination of a people. He said that the occupation regime over Jerusalem must be erased from the page of time.
    Leading the misinformation campaign, as it did on Iraq, was the New York Times. Jonathan Steele: “The New York Times, which was one of the first papers to misquote Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, came out on Sunday with a defensive piece attempting to justify its reporter’s original “wiped off the map” translation.
    The mis-translation originated with the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), located in Washington. MEMRI was founded in 1998 by Yigal Carmon along with Dr. Meyrav Wurmser. Carmon was a colonel in the IDF Intelligence from 1968-88, Acting head and adviser on Arab affairs, Civil Administration in Judea and Samaria, 1977-1982 and counterterrorism adviser to prime ministers Yitzhak Shamir and Yitzhak Rabin 1988-93.
    Iran kept its program hidden for 18 years until its disclosure by an Iranian opposition group in 2002
    If Iran really had a nuclear weapons program until 2003 as the new report claims, then why has the IAEA found no evidence of it? Why should we believe that Iran EVER had a nuclear weapons program at all? Some details of that alleged program, obtained from the hard-drive of a laptop computer, allegedly stolen in Iran in 2004, had been supplied to us a few months later, apparently by the same wonderful folks who had earlier supplied us the “intelligence” on Iraq, obtained by them from “Curveball.”
    Tehran has refused to comply with three U.N. Security Council resolutions demanding that it suspend the program while the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency completes an investigation
    The resolutions are illegal, and the IAEA doesn’t need to “complete an investigation” — Landay made that up.
    ElBaradei: “The Agency has been able to continue to verify the non-diversion of declared nuclear material in Iran. Iran has provided the Agency with access to declared nuclear material and has provided the required nuclear material accountancy reports in connection with declared nuclear material and activities.”
    Finally, Landay parroted Bush without comment: “The president reiterated his view that Iran has a right to civilian nuclear power. But, he said, the low-enriched uranium fuel for its reactors should be supplied by Russia,
    Bush’s view is irrelevant. Landay should know, and should have reported, that Iran has an absolute right to nuclear energy and is not bound to obtain fuel from anyone else.
    NPT: “Nothing in this Treaty shall be interpreted as affecting the inalienable right of all the Parties to the Treaty to develop research, production and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes without discrimination and in conformity with articles I and II of this Treaty.”

  3. The mis-translation originated with the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), located in Washington.
    Actually, you are quite wrong. MEMRI’s translation more closely approximated Juan Cole’s (although the MEMRI translation pre-dated Coles by about eight months):
    http://memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Page=archives&Area=sd&ID=SP101305
    The mis-translation actually originated in Iran, as published the day of the speech on the IRIB (Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting) Web site.

  5. Bush may not be the sharpest pencil in the drawer but at least, unlike McCain, he doesn’t repeatedly insist that Iran is supplying arms to Al Queda in Iraq.

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