Photograph Source: Dan Scavino – Public Domain

It has now been more than 30 years since the butcher of Auschwitz Gaza, Benjamin Netanyahu, warned the world that Iran would soon acquire nuclear weapons. In 1992, in an address to the Israeli Knesset, he stated: “Within three to five years, we can assume that Iran will become autonomous in its ability to develop and produce a nuclear bomb.” He repeated the warning and whispered the need to invade Iran in the ears of every US president ever since. The warnings became louder after Al Qaeda attacked the US. The Jerusalem Post reported on September 12, 2001, that “Netanyahu warned last night that the attack could be a harbinger of worse tragedies that could kill millions of people once Iran or Iraq acquires nuclear weapons.” Later Netanyahu admitted that he had told the US Congress that there was “no question whatsoever that [Saddam] Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction.” Ahead of the 2003 Iraq invasion, Netanyahu told the US Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, “you will finish this [invasion] very quickly. But your primary goal is the Iranian regime. And the Iranian regime is trying to develop a nuclear weapon.” He urged the US to invade both Iran and Iraq, but primarily Iran. This was, of course, at the time when Netanyahu’s moles in the White House, the so-called neocons (neoconservatives), were pushing George W. Bush to invade Iraq and Iran, in a policy that was called dual containment. Bush complied by invading Iraq, saying: “God told me to strike at al Qaeda and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam [Hussein], which I did, now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East.” But given the fiasco that followed the Iraq invasion, Bush did not grant Netanyahu his main wish, i.e., invading Iran. Netanyahu, however, kept trying. In 2009, after Barack Obama took office, Netanyahu told members of Congress that Iran was just one or two years away from nuclear capability.

Three years later, on September 27, 2012, Netanyahu appeared before the UN General Assembly and held up a diagram of a cartoonish-looking bomb with a fuse and drew a redline on it at 90% enriched uranium. The bizarre spectacle was mocked by some as “Bibi’s Wile E. Coyote-style cartoon bomb.” As I stated at the time, this was not only the proverbial “one too many times” that Netanyahu had cried wolf, but it was mocked so much by the media that it seemed to be the beginning of the end of Netanyahu’s intense and unsuccessful campaign to make the US attack Iran.

Netanyahu could not convince Obama that bombing Iran was necessary. Instead, Obama signed a deal with Iran in 2015 called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). In exchange for some sanctions relief, the JCPOA placed a 15-year limit on Iran’s enrichment of uranium to a maximum level of 3.67%, limited the stockpile of enriched uranium to 300 kilograms, and put a 10-year limit on the number of centrifuges Iran could operate. Netanyahu did everything in his power to sabotage the enactment of the JCPOA. He even appeared before a joint session of the US Congress in 2015 to challenge the US president and overturn the deal. He received standing ovations, but the JCPOA continued to hold despite much opposition to it in the US Congress.

But why was Netanyahu crying wolf for all those years and trying to defeat an agreement that assured peaceful nature of Iran’s nuclear program? The answer is that Netanyahu never believed that Iran is building a nuclear bomb. Like the case of Iraq,........

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