For at least the past two decades, political leaders in the United States and Israel have warned that Iran was on the threshold of building a nuclear weapon. From what we’ve been hearing lately from the media, Iran is once again … on that threshold.
Touting thousands of pages of carefully vetted intelligence, menacing satellite imagery, and tales of a mysterious Soviet nuclear scientist, the media is telling us that Iran is about to get The Bomb.
It began when the International Atomic Energy Agency issued a report that laid out the case against Iran. One newspaper headline called it a “red alert.” An ABC TV reporter said Iran is “carrying out activities whose sole purpose can only be the development of a nuclear weapon.”
Let’s play “Back to the Future” for a minute. Does anyone remember the last time we were told that a country with a four-letter name starting with I-R-A had amassed fearsome weapons based on solid “slam dunk” intelligence?
The big media failure on Iraq was that the major broadcast and print outlets weren’t skeptical of official claims. And that’s exactly what’s happening with Iran. Does that IAEA report really flash “red alert”? Hardly.
