There is no new NIE (National Intelligence Estimate) by US American intelligence agencies on Iran and its nuclear program. What Ehud Barak, Israel’s Defense Minister, once again tries these days to, well, misinform the public about a new situation,  looks as usual: outright disingenuous. There is no new urgency as to the “Iranian situation” whatever his US American colleague Leon Panetta had told him in Jerusalem last week. What Reuters quotes from an interview of Barak with Israel Radio sounds rather confused and desperate.

“There probably really is such an American intelligence report – I don’t know if it is an NIE one – making its way around senior offices (in Washington).

“As far as we know it brings the American assessment much closer to ours … it makes the Iranian issue even more urgent and (shows it is) less clear and certain that we will know everything in time about their steady progress toward military nuclear capability.”

According to what US National Director of Intelligence James Clapper said in congressional testimony earlier this year, Iran has not decided yet to build a nuclear weapon, and that had not changed since the notorious NIE of 2007 which made a monkey wrench in the works of Bush and Cheney and likely prevented another war in the Middle East. As Reuters reminds us today, Clapper had concluded then,

“We assess Iran is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons, in part by developing various nuclear capabilities that better position it to produce such weapons, should it choose to do so. We do not know, however, if Iran will eventually decide to build nuclear weapons.”

But what does President Obama is not different from Barak’s clamor. Being aware of the above, sanctions which are aimed for completely suffocate a country’s economy such that even reasonable Iranian dissidents in the United States like Muhammad Sahimi fear tens of thousands ordinary Iranians might be killed is no diplomacy.

It is an undeclared war of campaigning Barack Obama which has little to do with Iran’s nuclear program which is by all we know peaceful in nature. Its aim is regime change. And revenge for having humiliated a superpower in 1979.

August 10, 2012 @ 18:29

Last modified August 10, 2012.