Anti-Iran rhetoric, The Debate Show, Press TV

by  Jim W. Dean, VT Editor      …with Press TV, Tehran

The Iranians were very angry with the return by the US to its former Iran-bashing language of  “the military option is still on the table”.

Both SecDef Ashton Carter and John Kerry had used the term in a broad context, which of course had a whiff of preemptive strike invisible ink included in the message. I thought it was poorly handled at such a critical time.

Obama finally added the context of using military force only as a “last resort” to stop Iran from having a nuclear weapon.

This was very important as the “let’s attack Iran now crowd” prefers a definition of their “having the capacity to have one”, which in itself is subject to all kinds of self-serving definitions.

Many countries have the capacity to have nuclear weapons with never a word mentioned about sanctioning, much less an attack. The list includes Israel, India, Pakistan, Brazil, and a few others who have purchased them on the world market.

In addition to Obama’s statement above, he also surprised everyone with his warning that if Israel were to attack Iran in the future there would be “severe consequences.” Western media seems to have brushed that historical comment under the rug, but that was more of a threat to Israel than the inferred one to the Iranians. Forgive me if I can’t ever remember an American president warning Israel of  “severe consequences”.

The foundation of the NeoCon-Israeli lobby attack strategy to vote the agreement down in Congress is that it will assure the Iranians having a bomb. The inference is that they will be sneaky enough to fool the inspectors. But that is baloney, as Iran has a perfect IAEA compliance record to date of never having one gram of diverted nuclear material.

That is not something that Israel can claim, or the US for that matter, as Israeli espionage and American traitors have helped to pilfer our own retired weapons stocks.

We have our VT science advisor, Jeff Smith, an ex-IAEA inspector who has worked trying to hunt these down while on the Able Danger New York team. His last posting was tracking the Israeli art students and the moving companies shuffling stolen nuke material around. The Washington, DC Able Danger team all died at the Pentagon on 9-11, where they had been called in for an emergency meeting that morning. The general who called the meeting, he never showed up.

So Obama was making these public statements of “military action” to undercut the opposition’s self-serving but ridiculous claims of the P5+1 having negotiated for two years just to let Iran have a bomb. So far it is Israel and the Republican Congress against the deal, and against the rest of the world.

Maybe we should now sanction both of them for the threat they represent to all the rest of us. Boycotting Israel is not enough. It should be sanctioned as a WMD threat and a human rights serial violator. This is not a complicated issue. It is payback time. Let’s get on with it.

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–  First aired  …  July 25,  2015  –

In this edition of The Debate, Press TV has conducted an interview with Jim W. Dean, the managing editor at VT from Atlanta, and Kenneth Katzman, a senior analyst at the Congressional Research Service from Washington, to discuss the recent wave of anti-Iran rhetoric just days after the conclusion of talks over Iran’s nuclear program in Vienna.

You also can watch the program on the PressTV Debate Show home page here.

Jim W. Dean

Jim W. Dean was an active editor on VT from 2010-2022.  He was involved in operations, development, and writing, plus an active schedule of TV and radio interviews.

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