Twenty-Five Years Of Bomb, Bomb Iran [Updated]
Late 1970s: US receives intelligence that the Shah had “set up a clandestine nuclear weapons development program.”
1992: Israeli parliamentarian Benjamin Netanyahu tells his colleagues that Iran is 3 to 5 years from being able to produce a nuclear weapon – and that the threat had to be “uprooted by an international front headed by the US.”
1992: Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres tells French TV that Iran was set to have nuclear warheads by 1999. “Iran is the greatest threat and greatest problem in the Middle East,” Peres warned, “because it seeks the nuclear option while holding a highly dangerous stance of extreme religious militancy.”
1992: A task force of the House Republican Research Committee claimed that there was a “98 percent certainty that Iran already had all (or virtually all) of the components required for two or three operational nuclear weapons.” Similar predictions received airtime, including one from then-CIA chief Robert Gates that Iran’s nuclear program could be a “serious problem” in five years or less.
1995: The New York Times conveys the fears of senior US and Israeli officials that “Iran is much closer to producing nuclear weapons than previously thought” – about five years away – and that Iran’s nuclear bomb is “at the top of the list” of dangers in the coming decade.
1998: Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld reports to Congress that Iran could build an intercontinental ballistic missile – one that could hit the US – within five years. The CIA gave a timeframe of 12 years.
2002: President George W. Bush labels Iran as part of the “axis of evil,” along with Iraq and North Korea.
2004: Then-Secretary of State Colin Powell tells reporters that Iran had been working on technology to fit a nuclear warhead onto a missile. “We are talking about information that says they not only have [the] missiles but information that suggests they are working hard about how to put the two together,” he said.
2007: An unclassified National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran is released, which controversially judges with “high confidence” that Iran had given up its nuclear weapons effort in fall 2003. The report, meant to codify the received wisdom of America’s 16 spy agencies, turns decades of Washington assumptions upside down. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad calls the report a “victory for the Iranian nation.”
June 2008: Then-US Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton predicts that Israel will attack Iran before January 2009, taking advantage of a window before the next US president came to office.
August 2010: An article by Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic’s September issue is published online, outlining a scenario in which Israel would chose to launch a unilateral strike against Iran with 100 aircraft, “because a nuclear Iran poses the gravest threat since Hitler to the physical survival of the Jewish people.” Drawing on interviews with “roughly 40 current and past Israeli decision makers about a military strike” and American and Arab officials, Mr. Goldberg predicts that Israel will launch a strike by July 2011.
January 2011: When Meir Dagan steps down as director of Israel’s Mossad spy agency, he says that Iran would not be able to produce a nuclear weapon until 2015.
September 2012: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netnayahu, appearing on NBC’s Meet The Press, notes, “They are very close, they are six months away from being about 90 percent of having the enriched uranium for an atom bomb.”
[Updated] November 2013: Following an interim Iranian nuclear pact signed by the United States and five world nations, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced, “What was achieved last night in Geneva is not a historic agreement, but a historic mistake. Today the world has become a much more dangerous place because the most dangerous regime in the world has taken a significant step toward attaining the most dangerous weapon in the world.”
Although the White House has insisted the current deal marks “the first meaningful limits that Iran has accepted on its nuclear program in close to a decade,“ Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman countered "The world has to understand that this is the biggest diplomatic victory Iran has had in recent years”.
Israel’s economic minister Naftali Bennett added, “if a nuclear suitcase blows up in New York or Madrid five years from now, it will be because of the deal that was signed this morning.”
The Washington Monthly’s Ed Kilgore briefly noted, “I think it’s reasonable to cut the Israelis some slack here, since they are the object of violent and unremitting hostility from Tehran, and have their own counter-intimidation game to play. Besides, who expects Bibi Netanyahu to agree with Barack Obama on much of anything? We can just be happy that Bibi’s old friend Mitt Romney, who all but promised to let turn over U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East to Netanyahu, isn’t in office now. People who fall asleep at night dreaming of bombs falling are not particularly reliable commenters on the efforts of those seeking peaceful solutions.”
http://www.salon.com/2012/09/17/bibis_20_year_iran_warnings/
http://www.csmonitor.com/layout/set/print/content/view/print/422252
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal-a/2013_11/the_deal_with_iran047933.php
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