The most recent example of such blatant misinformation about Iran being spewed in public occurred at last Thursday’s Republican presidential debate. Michele Bachmann, who has made such outlandish statements as demanding the Iraqis pay reparations for the U.S. occupation of their country, said the following:
"We have an IAEA report that just recently came out that said, literally, Iran is within just months of being able to obtain that weapon."
This statement is false on it’s face, and only Ron Paul was willing to correct it, which he did immediately. Bachmann’s explicit misinformation was debunked by a number of objective third parties.
CNN says:
“The IAEA report does not say that Iran is within months of being able to obtain a nuclear weapon. So Bachmann is wrong.”
The New York Times says:
“[The IAEA’s] long awaited report… did not say a weapon was months away.”
Yahoo News Fact Check says:
“As Paul said, the report of the International Atomic Energy Agency does not state that Iran is within months of having nuclear arms.”
Another erroneous claim Bachmann made was to insist that Iran has stated it intends to use these hypothetical weapons to, in her words, “wipe Israel off the face of the earth.” This claim arises from an interview Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad gave in August. A difficulty arises in the translation of Ahmadinejad’s words from the Persian into English. The American idiom, “to wipe something off the face of the earth,” or as some have phrased it, “to wipe something off the map,” does not exist in the Persian language, and is exclusively an American idiom. The Israeli newspaper, the Haaretz Newspaper, translated Ahmadinejad’s words in the following way:
"Iran believes that whoever is for humanity should also be for eradicating the Zionist regime (Israel) as symbol of suppression and discrimination.”
This is distinctly different from saying an entire nation must be “wiped off the face of the earth.” What Ahmadinejad is saying, agree with it or disagree, is that the Israeli government has been guilty of certain human rights violations, and Iran does not want that regime to stay in power.
Many experts have testified to this effect. Juan Cole, a Middle East specialist at the University of Michigan told the New York Times,
"Ahmadinejad did not say he was going to wipe Israel off the map because no such idiom exists in Persian. He did say he hoped its regime, i.e., a Jewish-Zionist state occupying Jerusalem, would collapse."
Jonathan Steele, writing for the Guardian newspaper in London, put it this way,
"The Iranian president was quoting an ancient statement by Iran's first Islamist leader, the late Ayatollah Khomeini, that 'this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time,' just as the Shah's regime in Iran had vanished. He was not making a military threat. He was calling for an end to the occupation of Jerusalem at some point in the future. The 'page of time' phrase suggests he did not expect it to happen soon."
The independent fact checking website PolitiFact said this,
“Where Bachmann misstepped was by accusing Ahmadinejad of saying he planned to use a nuclear weapon against Israel or the United States… Ahmadinejad has said some tough things about the United States and Israel, but we find no evidence that he has said he would use a nuclear weapon against either country.”
Despite the clear evidence that the translation between these vastly incomparable languages has led to an inflated interpretation of Ahmadinejad’s actual words, let us suppose for a moment that Iran did develop a nuclear weapon, and did attempt to attack Iran or the U.S. The consequences for Iran would be grave and immediate. Israel is armed with over 300 nuclear weapons, capable of being launched at a moment’s notice. The U.S. has over 5,100 nuclear weapons at its disposal, and an incredibly efficient means of delivering them to any corner of the globe. Iran knows that if it even hints at using any form of nuclear force against Israel that the entire nation of Iran would be obliterated without pause. The same is true vis-à-vis the United States.
This concept is known as “mutually assured destruction,” that is, any country with nuclear weapons knows that if they use their nuclear weapons, the other countries will in all likelihood retaliate. The final outcome of an understanding of mutually assured destruction is peace, as neither side is willing to risk total annihilation by firing first. This is part of the reason the Cold War remained cold.
In fact, the rhetoric being spewed about the need to destroy Iran now is similar to that which was heard during the Cold War period, except then there was concrete evidence that Krushchev indeed had nuclear weapons.
Upon the collapse of the Soviet Union, Soviet foreign spokesman Gennadi Gerasimov warned the United States, "We have done the most terrible thing to you that we could possibly have done. We have deprived you of an enemy.” That is what this current debate about Iran is all about: the government elevating the fear of the public in order to facilitate more needless violence, and therefore, the further expansion of the government.
The truth is, the government loves war. As Randolph Bourne famously remarked, “War is the health of the state.” The trenchant warrior of liberty, philosopher Murray N. Rothbard once said,
“It is in war that the State really comes into its own: swelling in power, in number, in pride, in absolute dominion over the economy and the society. Society becomes a herd, seeking to kill its alleged enemies, rooting out and suppressing all dissent from the official war effort, happily betraying truth for the supposed public interest.”
Political historian Jonathan Finegold Catalan notes, with regard to the government’s current “War on Terror,”
“The greatest threat to American freedom proved to be, not the terrorists, but the very government that purportedly protects Americans. Indeed, in the years following the September 11 attacks, the Bush administration managed to perpetrate some of the most severe infringements on individual rights since the Roosevelt administration.”
It is high time we abandon blatant fallacies and the spreading of paranoia and propaganda in seeking new wars to instigate. As the great American statesman John Quincy Adams put it, “America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.”
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