On November 6, 2011, according to an AP news report, she said that the U.S. should be undermining Iran’s government in any way it can, specifically, “be doing everything we can to bring it down.” She said that the option of military force against Iran should be on the table and never be taken off. She said that Iran is trying to obtain a nuclear weapon and that “the regime has absolutely no legitimacy left.”
Why does Condoleezza Rice have any credibility on such an important issue after having misled America about Iraq and Saddam Hussein, erred about intelligence reports, and lied about the threat posed by Saddam? Why should anyone pay any attention to her whatsoever, when she knowingly participated in the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld-Powell-Rice propaganda effort to paint Saddam as a villain intent on destroying America?
Neoconservatives today are pitching the same lies as in the past. Condi in 2011 sounds like John Bolton in 2003, when he said:
“The estimate we have of how close the Iranians are to production of nuclear weapons grows closer each day.”
That’s 8 years ago and he is speaking about production, not development, not initial experiments, not computer simulations, and not the gathering of technical knowledge, but actual production.
A New York Daily News article dated April 1, 2003 groups Bolton and Rice:
“Bolton and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, in separate speeches to the annual conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, put a nuclear-potential Iran in the same category as North Korea, which is believed to be months from production of nuclear material for weapons.”
This assessment was totally wrong. Iran was nowhere near North Korea in being months from production of nuclear material of weapons grade. And production of such enriched uranium is not the same as having a workable bomb, and having such a bomb is not the same as being able to deliver it, and being able to deliver it is not the same as threatening to deliver it or actually using it.
Is it not of greater concern yet again to see that these warmongers are cuddling up to AIPAC and supporting its interest? Is it not of greater concern that Israel possesses a real, not imaginary, arsenal of terror in the form of nuclear bombs that it can deliver and that the world has been led to believe it will deliver under certain conditions?
I have said before and say again now that I believe that Iran is pursuing steps that ultimately may enable it to build a nuclear weapon. This is a judgment call. The evidence for this is not crystal clear. Some of it is from anonymous informers and states whose credibility is unknown. The latest IAEA report has an appendix with many allegations.
This progress, such as it is or may be, is not a threat to the U.S. If fully developed, it can be used as a threat against Israel. But since Israel has the capacity to create nuclear holocausts in Iran, this is not a threat of a first strike. It is a threat — if developed — that may deter Israel from a first strike, because retaliation might destroy Tel Aviv. But this is supposition and not in the picture as reality right now.
The U.S. should be trying to get Israel to disarm and trying to rid the whole world of nuclear weapons, in my opinion. It should not be focusing on Iran alone and it should not be doing it with warlike threats, sanctions, and embargoes; and the U.S. has to look to its own nuclear arsenal and those of other possessors and be looking to take them all down.
The neoconservatives automatically jump from almost any nuclear potential or knowledge in the hands of Iran to the idea that Israel is threatened or to the idea that Iran is a threat to the U.S. or to its region. Iran is no threat to either the U.S. or its region (Saudi Arabia). Then the neocons jump again to the idea that the U.S. should attack Iran. There is no logic to such stupidity, which rests, as far as I can tell, mainly on either loyalty to Israel or to exaggerated notions of U.S. hegemony or both.
The neocons are warmongers who are willing to start an aggressive war upon the idea that they perceive the threat of an aggressive threat, when, as just explained, a distant threat is not only distant but may well also be a defensive one.
The nations of man would be fools to endorse the doctrine of preemptive wars as justifiable. It opens the door to wars based on mere guesswork, hunches, and faulty intelligence. It provides a convenient excuse for wars initiated for other motives under the cover of eliminating threats. It allows aggressive wars of aggrandizement disguised as defensive wars. It erases the line between defensive and aggressive warfare.
But anyway who says that Iran means to attack anyone? It hasn’t attacked any nearby country in hundreds of years. Why should it attack anyone and be subjected to devastating counterattacks from the U.S. and/or NATO and/or Israel? Iran’s leaders are rational. They are not madmen. If they are inching toward nuclear weapons or even trotting toward them, they have excellent reasons for doing so. They need to deter threats coming from Israel and the U.S. They need bargaining chips. They need to negotiate from strength.
Condi’s role or assignment in the Bush propaganda campaign was mainly to suggest links between Saddam and al-Qaeda. It was she who said on Sept. 25, 2002:
“There clearly are contacts between al-Qaida and Iraq that can be documented; there clearly is testimony that some of the contacts have been important contacts and that there’s a relationship here. … And there are some al-Qaida personnel who found refuge in Baghdad.”
These vague claims, even if they were true, provided no justification for war, but they added to the chorus of Bush-led warmongers who were stirring up America. Even years later, we were given no evidence that her allusions meant a damn thing concerning the security of Americans. If anything we found out that there were frictions or uneasy dealings between some al-Qaeda people and some people in Iraq. There never was a concerted effort of Iraq to export terrorism to America.
It was Rice who spoke of not waiting for the “mushroom cloud” in America. Here are her actual words, designed to mislead and alarm Americans and stampede them into approval of aggression against Iraq:
“‘We know that he has the infrastructure, nuclear scientists to make a nuclear weapon,’ she told me. ‘And we know that when the inspectors assessed this after the Gulf War, he was far, far closer to a crude nuclear device than anybody thought — maybe six months from a crude nuclear device.’
Dr. Rice then said something that was ominous and made headlines around the world.
“‘The problem here is that there will always be some uncertainty about how quickly he can acquire nuclear weapons. But we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.’”
As we all now know or should know, Americans in the buildup to the Iraq War were being fed a steady stream of lies, distortions, deceptions and exaggerations.
No one should be listening to Condi Rice now on Iran. Her credibility is zilch. She is representative of the larger group of neoconservatives who are still around, still with access to power and media, still influential, still supporting Israel’s cause, still peddling horrid doctrines, and still aching for war, this time against Iran.
