Israel’s June 13 attack on Iran, which the US joined on June 22, was framed as a desperate attempt to pre-empt an imminent Iranian nuclear threat. On June 21, Donald Trump insisted that his Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, was mistaken when she testified, in March, that Iran was not building a nuclear weapon.
According to CBS News, a reporter asked Trump: “What intelligence do you have that Iran is building a nuclear weapon? Your intelligence community had said they have no evidence that they are at this point.” Trump responded: “Well then, my intelligence community is wrong. Who in the intelligence community said that?” The reporter answered: “Your director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard.” “She’s wrong,” Trump insisted. Later he told reporters aboard Air Force One: “I don’t care what she said, I think they were very close to having one.”
It was all a big lie. Trump was getting his so-called intelligence from Israel, which was reeling from a wave of Iranian counter-strikes and desperately needed the US to join the war. Shockingly, we now know that Israel never really believed that Iran was building a nuclear bomb.
Recently-leaked Israeli documents show that Israel’s real motives for attacking Iran, and drawing the US into its war, were very different from the “immanent nuclear threat” claim. On September 14, Israeli Channel 13 published leaked transcripts of Netanyahu’s security cabinet meetings just before and during the June war. According to Netanyahu’s own words, and those of his advisors, the real aim of the war was not to pre-empt an imminent Iranian bomb—they knew there was no such threat—but rather to kill Iran’s Supreme Leader and as many other leaders as possible, slaughter top Iranian scientists, inflict maximum damage on Iran’s ballistic missile sites, terrorize the Iranian people, cause a mass exodus from Tehran, and thereby, hopefully, instigate a regime change. The nuclear threat, Netanyahu admitted, was “within a few years,” not days, weeks, or months.
Even Netanyahu’s claim that Iran would build nuclear weapons “within a few years” may have been grossly exaggerated. The leaked transcripts show a senior military figure explaining that the real military rationale for bombing Iran—aside from the attempt to instigate regime change—was “to improve Israel’s strategic balance” and “preventing Tehran from going nuclear in the long term.”
Let that sink in. Israel was trying to stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons “in the long term.” What does that mean, in years? I knew the approximate answer, but asked ChatGPT anyway: “When military strategists talk about ‘the long term’ what is the time frame, in years, they’re referring to?”
ChatGPT replied:
“Short term: Months to 1–2 years (immediate operations, contingencies, current deployments).
Medium term: About 3–7 years (building readiness, procurement cycles, training new units, near-future conflicts).
Long term: Typically 10–30 years…”
So to the extent that there was any real prospect of Iran building nuclear weapons, it was in the time frame of ten to thirty years. Yet Netanyahu and Trump risked World War III by massively bombing Iran on a blatantly false pretext—a pretext that makes George W. Bush’s lies about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction seem tame by comparison.
Ironically, the failed Israeli-American attack on Iran may create the very scenario it ostensibly sought to avoid. Iran’s aging Supreme Leader has repeatedly re-issued a religious edict banning nuclear weapons and other WMD. He insists that such weapons are sinful. That’s why strategists have long known—as Tulsi Gabbard said, and a top military advisor to Netanyahu confirmed—that it is highly unlikely that Iran will build a nuke in the foreseeable future…at least it was unlikely, until Netanyahu and Trump kicked the hornet’s nest with their June attack. That attack caused the Iranian people to rise up in fury behind a new generation of hardline leaders, far more militant than the current Supreme Leader, who are open to the argument, now supported by the majority of the Iranian people, that Iran must scrap its prohibition on WMD and build or buy nuclear bombs to deter future attacks.
According to a leading expert, Theodore Postol of MIT, Iran may have already built nuclear weapons in response to the June attack. In an interview with Glenn Diesen headlined “Iran Is Now an Undeclared Nuclear State,” Postol explained that the Israeli-US attack didn’t harm Iran’s now-hidden stockpile of 60% enriched uranium, which can be quickly, easily, and secretly made into bombs.
So the real reason Iran wasn’t building nukes was that it didn’t want them. But now, thanks to Netanyahu and Trump, it probably does.
The June attack wasn’t just a big lie, and a crime. It was a mistake—a blunder of epic proportions.
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