Debunking Iran War Propaganda
Scott Horton sat down with The American Conservative’s Harrison Berger to discuss the forces driving U.S. confrontation with Iran, focusing on the legal status of Iran’s nuclear program, the intelligence record on weaponization claims, and the collapse of the 2015 JCPOA nuclear agreement. Horton explains how successive U.S. administrations, under constant Israeli pressure, have framed Iran’s uranium enrichment itself as a casus belli, despite the nation’s continued membership in the Non-Proliferation Treaty and repeated U.S. intelligence assessments finding no active nuclear weapons program.
It was reported that Trump has given the Iranian authorities an ultimatum. They have to not only end their nuclear program, but must also stop producing missiles that can reach Israel, and end support for what are called these “Iranian proxy groups,” like Hezbollah and the Houthis. We’re always told that Iran or Russia—or whichever country that the hawks want to send us into war with at the moment—that they’re always the most intractable enemy, they just can’t be negotiated with. But it seems like the side that is impossible to negotiate with, at least in this case, is the United States, who keeps shifting these terms at Israel’s behest and demanding that Iran accept terms that we already know are unacceptable to that country. Is that incorrect?
No, that’s the way I look at that. A close parallel from history would be the Rambouillet Accord, Madeleine Albright’s ultimatum to Slobodan Milosevic to prevent the Kosovo War of 1999. It was a deal that was made to be rejected. And I think this is the same kind of thing where they’re essentially laying down demands that are, certainly in the case of the missiles, just impossible. Demanding that they stop supporting Hezbollah and the Houthis and then entirely abandoning their nuclear program, not just enrichment, I mean this has been an absolute hardline position of the Ayatollah since 2006, that once they mastered the nuclear fuel cycle that they’re never going back and they’re never going to stop enrichment. It’s a matter of national independence and national pride.
