Listen To the Experts, Don’t Listen to the Bloodthirsty Fools Like Netanyahu Driving Us Towards War With Iran

This is terrifying. Benjamin Netanyahu is a far right crackpot who has done his best to drive Israel away from democracy. Israeli police said that the Prime Minister should be indicted, and in response, he has resulted to the same fallback of every desperate ruler ever: beating the drums of war. We are good. They are bad. That is the drama surrounding the Iran deal right now, and Netanyahu is playing a dangerous game. But don’t take it from me, take it from a few nuclear weapon experts debunking the Israeli Prime Minister’s assertion that Iran has lied about its compliance with the Iran deal.

First up, Michael Ellman, Senior Fellow for Missile Defense at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. He provided us with visual proof of this presentation’s absolute bunkness. The bombs highlighted by Bibi Netanyahu’s own presentation don’t fit in the post-2004 design of the nosecone.

So the 2003 bomb design presented by Bibi fits in Iran’s pre-2004 Nodong/Shahab-3 nosecone, but not any of the post-2004 missiles, which use the “baby bottle” geometry. i.e. the extended range Ghadr missiles Bibi highlighted later in his presentation. pic.twitter.com/gzdSVKhPoc

— Michael Elleman (@EllemanIISS) April 30, 2018

Per Netanyahu’s logic, we have nothing to worry about. That bomb that concerns him only fits in a certain type of missile that the Iranians discontinued in 2004.

Next up, Joshua H. Pollack, Editor of the Nonproliferation Review (a journal concerned with the spread of nuclear and biological weapons). He gave us documentation proving that nothing Netanyahu touched on was new knowledge.

And that’s what was new in this presentation: the visuals. The major factual claims about Iran’s nuclear program in his presentation have been familiar for years. I admit to some doubts about whether these documents really were acquired weeks ago.

— Joshua H. Pollack (@Joshua_Pollack) April 30, 2018

The second major thrust: that the program, called Project Amad or the Amad Plan, was not totally discarded, but preserved in a sort of standby status under the rubric of “SPND.” That was one of the major claims in a 2011 IAEA report. https://t.co/6mOJvHoQPZpic.twitter.com/KubAJhHZha

— Joshua H. Pollack (@Joshua_Pollack) April 30, 2018

Everything else that Bibi showed us today was also touched upon in the 2011 report. In the 2011 report, some of it was sourced to “the alleged studies,” aka Laptop of Death, which were acquired in 2005. https://t.co/VBx2zlVrmj

— Joshua H. Pollack (@Joshua_Pollack) April 30, 2018

I have no reason to question the authenticity of any of these materials, but I do wonder how new they truly are. Nothing shown today alters the story as we have known it since 2011; they just provide vivid illustration. (END)

— Joshua H. Pollack (@Joshua_Pollack) April 30, 2018

Ali Vaez is the Director of the International Crisis Group’s Iran project, and he accused Israel of hacking the International Atomic Energy Agency as the best explanation for the “new” information unearthed by this sham of a presentation.

2/ Also, it is clear that if he had a smoking gun, he’d have been able to blow a large hole in Iran’s credibility and standing in the world. He could have pushed the @iaeaorg to pursue a few of the clues and come up with hard evidence

— Ali Vaez (@AliVaez) April 30, 2018

4/ We knew most of what he already said. In fact it was public knowledge: https://t.co/uYobqEIeRj

— Ali Vaez (@AliVaez) April 30, 2018

6/ But even if for a minute one believes everything that Bibi said, it vindicates the #IranDeal, which has established the most rigorous inspection regime ever implemented. We need the deal to verify Bibi’s claims, without it Iran can do whatever it wants https://t.co/RWbaINk4cT

— Ali Vaez (@AliVaez) April 30, 2018

8/ And his target is an administration that has not set the bar higher, and has a casual relationship with facts https://t.co/O62tFO4nWv

— Ali Vaez (@AliVaez) April 30, 2018

9/9 So all is all, this is a pretty clear attempt at recycling old info to create new hype and push @realDonaldTrump to pull the plug on the #IranDeal and push Iran and the US into a military conflict to weaken and contain Iran. Read more here: https://t.co/xEYiMAUr4e

— Ali Vaez (@AliVaez) April 30, 2018

And if that isn’t enough expertise to convince you, Donald Trump’s own Secretary of Defense, James Mattis, said to the Senate Armed Services Committee this week that the Iran deal creates conditions which make it extremely difficult to lie like Netanyahu says they have.

“I will say it is written almost with an assumption that Iran would try to cheat. So the verification, what is in there, is actually pretty robust as far as our intrusive ability to get in.”

If that’s still not enough, and you’re the kind of person who believes that Republican politicians are where “fake news” starts becoming “real news,” then let me present to you the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Senate Foreign Relations Chairman @BobCorker tells Bloomberg TV that Netanyahu speech on Iran provided “nothing new” that wasn’t already widely known

— Erik Wasson (@elwasson) April 30, 2018

If this episode has your Iraq War spidey senses tingling, don’t panic, they’re working correctly. This is a serious alert. Doofuses with absolutely no plan past “contain Iran” are trying to march us into yet another intractable war in the Middle East. We’re already effectively fighting Iran through our proxy war in Yemen (that has led to us committing a litany of war crimes on the Yemeni people), so there’s no need to open up another front in an already unnecessary war. Ultimately, the only proof that you need that Netanyahu is completely full of it is that the same morons who sold us the Iraq War bought Bibi’s slideshow hook, line and sinker.

This is one powerful presentation by @netanyahu.
Anyone who doesn’t think Iran was lying and still is lying doesn’t know Iran.

— Ari Fleischer (@AriFleischer) April 30, 2018

Jacob Weindling is a staff writer for Paste politics. Follow him on Twitter at @Jakeweindling.