I’m lucky that veteran investigative journalist Gareth Porter decided to take a break from his latest project on the Cold War to talk about how his 2014 book, Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iranian Nuclear Scare has come full circle, unfortunately, in Donald Trump’s war on Iran today.
Trump talks incessantly about Iran’s “47-year war” with the United States, but the pathway to the present crisis began in the early 1990’s after the fall of the Soviet Union, when national security state minions like Bob Gates were looking for the next bugaboo and neocons like Paul Wolfowitz and Dick Cheney were beginning to agitate for a new Middle East policy to protect Israel’s defense interests. By the Clinton years, these players were able to convince the people in power that Iran was a dangerous nuclear and terrorist threat. By the George W. Bush administration, regime change emerged as the “only” resolution to that threat.
Porter walks us through the evolution of U.S. policy toward Iran during this time, and the Israelis role in it. His book is meticulously detailed, underscoring how the “scare” was used by Israel to influence multiple administrations, in particular, to prevent any move toward diplomacy. When the Obama administration was able to hammer through a deal to resolve the nuclear issue peacefully, Trump blew it up. Now, along with Israel’s encouragement, he is trying to blow up Iran, literally. But as anticipated by many informed analysts, it is an ill-fated gambit, one that could have been avoided if Washington had not started down the primrose path three decades ago.
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