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By Root 2925 0

very next day, and was made the subject of an official Israeli government complaint to the United Nations.52 And it would be reported in this form by U.S. print and wire service media more than 2,000 times over the next 33 months.53 But almost surely this quote was inaccurately reported by McClellan et al.—as Juan Cole has pointed out, Ahmadinejad never uttered anything like “wiped out,” but said instead “This occupation regime over Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time.”54 Ahmadinejad was paraphrasing Khomeini, who years ago said that Israel “must vanish from the pages of time.” Both were speaking of regime change, not extermination; and neither Khomeini nor Ahmadinejad came close to suggesting that Iran itself was threatening the existence of Israel or even pursuing regime change in Jerusalem. But the quote, mistranslated, was a handy instrument of demonization and threat inflation.

Another part of the context that the MSM bypass is the fact that the United States itself is in serious violation of the NPT, and that for most of the world it poses (along with Israel) a serious nuclear weapons threat. In becoming a party to the NPT back in 1968, the United States, along with the other four declared nuclear weapons states China, France, the Soviet Union, and the U.K., assumed the obligation to “pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race . . . and to nuclear disarmament,” as well as a new and more comprehensive treaty “on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.” The declared nuclear weapons states also pledged to facilitate the “development of the applications of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes, especially in the territories of non-nuclear-weapon States Party to the Treaty, with due consideration for the needs of the developing areas of the world.”55 The United States has violated all such promises. It has never made any move to eliminate its peerless nuclear weapons and means of delivery, and, to the contrary, has explicitly proclaimed them to be an integral component of its power-projection and weapons-plans for the future. The Clinton administration’s military and intelligence planners went so far as to call for “dominating the space dimension of military operations to protect U.S. interests and investment,” much in the way armies and navies did in earlier years, but now with a sole hegemon, which must develop “space-based strike weapons [enabling] the application of precision force from, to, and through space.”56 The United States has threatened to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear-weapons parties to the NPT, and has long threatened to do this “pre-emptively” (i.e., aggressively);57 in early 2008, a similar policy appears to have been adopted by the entire NATO command.58 What is more, in the case of Iran, the United States has made clear its opposition to any Iranian nuclear programs even designed for civilian use. In fact, in the immediate aftermath of Bush’s “mission accomplished” speech, the White House began seeking a repeal of the ban on the development of tactical nuclear weapons that dated to 1993, contending that it “has had a chilling effect on weapons research at a time when the United States is trying to reconfigure its military to address post-Soviet threats.”59

These U.S. developments are widely seen as dangerous and provocative, providing a strong incentive for non-nuclear states to develop nuclear weapons as a means of self-defense. Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld has stated that as the “world has witnessed how the United States attacked Iraq for, as it turned out, no reason at all,” the Iranians “would be crazy” if they didn’t try to build nuclear weapons.60 Former NATO planner Michael MccGwire writes that under current policies, largely driven by Washington, “a nuclear exchange is ultimately inevitable,” as a nuclear arms race is being provoked by U.S. aggressiveness. “The irony of the situation is that it is in our power to eliminate the threat of global nuclear war…