Bush lies again about Iran

Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei

Yeah, I know, it's hardly news when Bush lies about foreign policy issues.

But he said in his press conference Sunday, "it's up to Iran to prove to the world that they're a stabilizing force as opposed to a destabilizing force. After all, this is a government that has proclaimed its desire to build a nuclear weapon." (my emphasis)

Now, I do think from everything I see on this issue that Iran is trying to achieve a nuclear weapons capability. This past May, I heard former German Foreign Minister and Green Party leader Joschka Fischer speak in San Francisco, and he also said that he had no doubt that was Iran's intent - although he just shook his head in dismay at the idea of using that as a reason for an American military attack on Iran.

But the government of Iran has not "proclaimed its desire to build a nuclear weapon". Their official policy has consistently been that they are seeking only peaceful nuclear power and that they intend to act within the bounds of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's supreme religious and political leader, has even said that acquiring an atomic weapon would be against the principles of Islam.

Farideh Farhi addresses this issue in Afghanistan, Iraq and the Bush Administration’s Incoherent Iran Policy Informed Comment Global Affairs blog 08/07/07. Noting that Bush's statement is "an outright misstatement (more accurately, a lie)", he writes:

This is while the Iranian government has never articulated such a desire and in fact has repeatedly claimed, genuinely or disingenuously, the opposite. The Iranian pursuit of nuclear weapons (as distinct from the pursuit of the capability to build nuclear weapons), as of today, remains a charge and assertion. The issue at hand, repeatedly described through intense European negotiations with Iran, concerns Iran’s enrichment-related programs and the fact that those programs will eventually give Iran the technological “capability” to build nuclear weapons even if Iran denies the desire to build the bomb. The point has always been that "they" cannot be trusted with the technology and not the proclaimed desire to build the bomb.

Given the general recklessness of the Cheney-Bush foreign policy, this is the kind of false statement on which we should all cast a critical eye.

Tags: bush administration, iran