Iran poses no serious threat to American national security, despite Trump and the U.S. government stoking fears of a phantom threat, writes EricLevitz
War is over . Photo: Atta Kenare/AFP via Getty Images Five years ago, Benjamin Netanyahu informed the U.S. Congress that the Iranian government, and the terrorist group ISIS, were two different flavors of the same poison.
Five years later, it is now indisputable that this was, in fact, the case. The nuclear deal did not collapse beneath the weight of Iran’s bad faith, but beneath that of our own. And if Iran’s attempts to uphold that agreement did not put its rationality beyond dispute, its response to the killing of Qasem Soleimani surely must.
In remarks to the nation Wednesday morning, the president wisely shrugged off Iran’s tepid retaliation. But even as he implicitly acknowledged Tehran’s restraint, Trump reaffirmed the right’s conception of Iran as a “terrorist” state. He did not deride Soleimani as a war criminal, but as “the world’s top terrorist,” described Iran as the world’s “top sponsor of terrorism,” and claimed that its “pursuit of nuclear weapons threatens the civilized world.
But the Trump administration, and its allied anti-Iran hawks, conjure phantom threats to American security with exceptional fervor and mendacity. And not without reason: If Americans had a clearer understanding of the nature of “the Iranian threat,” they would likely have less tolerance for Donald Trump’s belligerent posture toward Tehran.
To appreciate this point, consider some pieces of context for the U.S.-Iran conflict that are routinely elided in the American press. • Despite these historical grievances, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, Iran rounded up suspected Al Qaeda members who had crossed its border with Afghanistan, made copies of their passports, passed their information along to the U.S. government, and allowed American officials to interrogate many of the detainees. James F.
Photo: Courtesy of BBC This list obviously represents a potted history of the U.S.-Iran conflict, one that highlights the latter nation’s grievances to the exclusion of the former’s. My aim here is not to provide a comprehensive account of relations between the two countries, but merely to offer a corrective to U.S.-centric coverage of the conflict, so as to help Americans better understand the nature of the Iranian “threat” they supposedly face.
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