ABSTRACT
For the entire month of February 2006, even after the IAEA had resolved to report Iran to the Security Council, the US and Israeli accusations and threats against Iran continued. Reuters reported on February 1, 2006 that “President George W. Bush vowed on Wednesday the United States will rise to Israel’s defense if needed against Iran and denounced Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for ‘menacing talk’ against Israel.” Three days later Reuters reported that “Richard Perle, a key U.S. architect of the Iraq invasion, said the West should not make the mistake of waiting too long to use military force if Iran comes close to getting an atomic weapon.” “Israel,” he stated, “had chosen not to wait until it was too late to destroy the key facility Saddam Hussein’s secret nuclear weapons program in Osirak, Iraq in 1981.”1 On February 4, 2006 the National Iranian American Council reported that at a panel discussion entitled “Next Steps: The Iranian Threat”—held at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI)—Patrick Clawson, deputy director at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, stated: “Only a fall of the Islamic Republic will lead to an end of the Iranian [nuclear] program.” The same report stated that Clawson’s remarks were shared by other panelists, including Danielle Pletka of AEI who equated the end of “the nuclear weapons program” with the “the end of the [Iranian] regime.” Three days later Vice President Dick Chaney was quoted as saying: “When you think about a government like Iran that has a history of sponsorship of terrorist organizations … a nation that is now governed by a man who has talked repeatedly, for example, about the destruction of Israel, that everybody’s concerned that if Iran were equipped with nuclear weapons, that would become a major source of instability in that part of the world” (Reuters, February 7, 2006). Subsequently the Voice of America reported on February 17, 2006 that the “U.S. House of Representatives has overwhelmingly approved a non-binding resolution condemning Iran over its nuclear program, and calling for international sanctions to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.” The vote, according to the report was, 404 to1 in favor, with Representatives Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Tom Lantos leading the pack.
