Barack Obama and John Kerry are playing with fire.
They presumably want Congress and the American public to accept the nuclear agreement they and four other governments struck with Iran, but they work against their own objective by accepting the false premise of their opponents: namely, that Iran's regime is untrustworthy, dangerous, bent on becoming a nuclear power, and containable only by a U.S. readiness to wage war.
Who knows if the president and secretary of state really believe this?
But they ought to know that this premise is wrong.
Their incentive to accept the false premise is obvious.
Neither wants his obituary to declare that his greatest achievement was to persuade Iran not to develop a weapon it had no intention of developing.
...It would be better for Obama and Kerry to tell the truth for once:
This has long been well-understood by American and Israeli intelligence and military agencies.
As former CIA analyst Ray McGovern points out, George W. Bush had to give up plans to attack Iran in 2007 because a National Intelligence Estimate signed by all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies found that Iran had stopped (alleged) research on nukes four years earlier.
This conclusion was renewed regularly in subsequent years.
In fact, as Gareth Porter notes, "US national intelligence estimates during the Bush administration concluding that Iran had run such a program, including the most famous estimate issued in November 2007, were based on inference, not on hard intelligence."
We have many other indications of Iran's non-interest in nukes, all of which are documented by Porter, the man who literally wrote the book on the case. (See Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare.)"...
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