Christopher Preble has an article at Cato on how rightwing NeoCon pundit Charles Krauthammer exaggerated Iran's space-launch capability as equivalent to "putting nuclear weapons in New York".
Preble mentions that the launch of the Russian Sputnik space satellite was also used for similar scaremongering purposes. I think a more recent example that he touches on is the "Missile Gap" scare of the 1970s. Ironically, that bit of scaremongering was done by the the same NeoCons -- Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Cheney -- who along with Charles Krauthammer pushed for a war in Iraq, and are now pressing for a war on Iran. And, they used the same techniques to manipulate the intelligence then: by creating a parallel intelligence operation ("Team b") which naturally reached all the conclusions that the NeoCons wanted it to reach, namely that Russia/Iraq/Iran pose a threat to the US, and whose "findings" were leaked to the public in order to force their agenda into the policymaking process.
According to Trita Parsi -- a must read -- Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Cheney took senior positions in the government that made the nuclear deals with the Shah -- accepting Iran's need for alternative ways of energy "production".
Posted by: k_w | February 06, 2010 at 11:40 AM