The history of Netanyahu’s rhetoric on Iran’s nuclear ambitions | Benjamin Netanyahu News

For more than three decades, a familiar refrain echoes Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: Iran is about to develop nuclear weapons.

Since 1992, when Netanyahu addressed the Knesset of Israel as a deputy, he always said that Tehran was only in the years of the acquisition of a nuclear bomb. “In three to five years, we can assume that Iran will become independent in its ability to develop and produce a nuclear bomb,” he said at the time. The prediction was later repeated in his 1995 book, Fighting Terrorism.

The feeling of imminent threat has repeatedly shaped Netanyahu’s commitment to the United States officials. In 2002, he appeared before a committee of the American Congress, pleading for the invasion of Iraq and suggesting that Iraq and Iran were running to obtain nuclear weapons. The invasion of Iraq led by the United States followed shortly after, but no weapon of mass destruction was found.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzmtdwsef8s

In 2009, a cable from the American State Department published by Wikileaks revealed this by telling the members of the Congress that Iran was only one or two years of nuclear capacity.

Three years later, at the United Nations General Assembly, Netanyahu brandished a drawing of a cartoon of a bomb to illustrate its assertions that Iran was closer than ever to the nuclear threshold. “Next spring, at most the next summer … They will have finished the average enrichment and will go to the last stage,” he said in 2012.

Now, more than 30 years after its first warning, Israel has conducted attacks on Iran while Netanyahu maintains that the threat remains urgent. “If he is not arrested, Iran could produce a nuclear weapon in a very short time,” he said recently, suggesting that the calendar could be months or even weeks.

These statements persist despite the statements of the American director of national intelligence earlier this year, Iran did not build a nuclear weapon.

For Netanyahu, the message has barely changed for decades – a warning that seems to transcend intelligence assessments and changing diplomatic developments.