The Phantom Menace

While he was vice-president in the previous US administration, Dick Cheney repeatedly insisted the US needed to bomb the Iranians to snuff out their nuclear ambitions; so did senator John McCain and innumerable other politicians — Republican and Democrat, domestic and foreign.

But what if it’s all hysteria? Could Iran be little more than a phantom menace?

Interviews with military strategists and foreign and domestic intelligence officers, and a review of the 34 years of warnings about the Iranians’ threat to America’s vital interests, all show that the doom-saying is based on suspicion, supposition, and precious little hard data. It is, in many ways, a repeat of the supposed threat from Iraq that led to war — except this time, the intelligence world knows there are no weapons of mass destruction.