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MccGwire stresses that the elimination of the threat of nuclear war depended heavily on the effectiveness of the NPT, which is threatened with virtual collapse as the United States refuses to go along with either of the main components of that agreement: helping all parties that renounce the development or acquisition of nuclear weapons to fully develop nuclear energy for peaceful purposes; and, second, obliging all parties that entered the treaty as nuclear-weapons states to work towards disarmament under truly international control. At the May 2005 NPT Review Conference in New York City, Washington’s goal was to rescind both promises. That stand reinforces the “cynical view,” MccGwire writes, “that, whatever the original intentions, the NPT is now a convenient instrument of U.S. foreign policy.”62 The U.S. media gave little attention to this review conference, but what coverage they did give it adhered closely to the U.S. agenda. As the conference opened the New York Times wrote that it “was meant to offer hope of closing huge loopholes in the treaty, which the United States says Iran and North Korea have exploited to pursue nuclear weapons.”63 The Times admits that the U.S. plans to work around the UN and “avoid subjecting the United States to a broad debate about whether it is in compliance with its own obligations under the treaty” and the U.S. rejection of some of the thirteen steps for nuclear disarmament unanimously approved at the 2000 NPT review conference. But such matters do not bear on “hopes” that the conference was “meant to” realize. The Times report then focuses almost entirely on U.S. charges regarding Iran’s programs, just as the Times and MSM broadly focused on Iraq’s WMD in 2002–3 as part of the propaganda war servicing a forthcoming war.

In the more than five years since the U.S. and U.K. launched their war against Iraq on March 19–20, 2003, the IAEA has published no fewer than 22 different written reports on Iran’s nuclear program.64 During this period, the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) held two Ministerial Conferences at which it released statements on issues related to Iran’s nuclear program. In essentially identical documents (the only changes coming in each document’s fourth paragraph, where the NAM recognizes the IAEA’s ongoing work), the NAM reaffirmed the “inalienable right of all States” under the NPT to research and develop nuclear energy “for peaceful purposes,” recognized the IAEA as the “sole competent authority” in the nuclear arena (in contrast, say, to the Security Council), called for the “establishment in the Middle East of a nuclear-weapons-free-zone” and “demanded Israel to accede to the NPT without delay and place promptly all its nuclear facilities under comprehensive IAEA safeguards” (just like Iran does), and rejected “any attack or threat of attack against peaceful nuclear facilities . . .”—a possible U.S. and Israeli attack on Iran’s facilities having loomed increasingly large for the past two or three years. The NAM’s far-reaching re-affirmations of the expressed principles of international order were never quoted by any major U.S. print media; in fact, it wasn’t until the second NAM statement, on July 30, 2008, that a U.S. wire service reported something substantive about them.65

In sum, the U.S. party line is that Iran is a serious threat and must not be allowed to advance its nuclear program as this might some day enable it to produce a nuclear weapon. The fact that the United States is violating the NPT and that Israel refuses to sign up to the NPT and has secretly built a nuclear weapons arsenal, may be seen as a problem by the NAM and ordinary citizens across the globe, but they are not seen as problematic in Washington or among its clients, and hence are not issues for the MSM. Condoleezza Rice’s acknowledgement several years before the plan to attack Iraq, that Iraq couldn’t use any WMD because it would be annihilated in response, also applies to Iran. Any bomb