The aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford is poised to attack Iran. (US Navy photo)

IT MAY HAVE BEEN AMONG THE SCARIER MOMENTS in the run up to the war in Iraq—and one that has taken on eerie new relevance in light of today’s looming military confrontation with Iran.

In September, 2002, the British government of Prime Minister Tony Blair—seeking to help President George W. Bush bolster his case for an invasion—released a white paper making the alarming claim that Saddam Hussein could launch a ballistic missile attack with chemical or biological weapons against the United Kingdom within 45 minutes.

Predictably, the British tabloids went crazy. “He’s got him…Let’s get him,” screamed the headline in The Sun. “45 Minutes from Attack,” declared The Evening Standard over a picture of long-range ballistic missiles.

It was all a fraud, of course: Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction—no nuclear bombs, no mobile biological labs, as Bush and his officials claimed—much less ballistic missiles that it could unleash on British or American citizens. In the U.K.’s political folklore, Blair’s white paper came to be known as “the dodgy dossier,” and one of the top intelligence officials who worked on it, David Kelly, conceded to the BBC the document had been “sexed up.” Kelly later took a long walk in the woods and committed suicide, slashing his left wrist with a knife.

Nothing quite so dramatic followed President Donald Trump’s State of the Union this week when he outlined reasons for threatening the Iranian government with a full blown military attack. But at least one of his claims evoked Blair’s famously fallacious white paper.

“They’ve already developed missiles that can threaten Europe and our bases overseas, and they’re working to build missiles that will soon reach the United States of America,” Trump said about Iran’s ballistic missile program.

In fact, there has been no intelligence reporting suggesting that Iran is close to having an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of hitting the U.S. homeland. A Defense Intelligence Agency report last year concluded that Iran wouldn’t have a “militarily viable ICBM” until 2035

“So I’ve been hearing the Iranians are a year away from being able to strike the United States for 25 years,” Jon Alterman, the longtime director of the Middle East program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a prominent national security think tank, said on the SpyTalk podcast. “At some point that may be true. I don’t have any evidence that it’s true now.” He also threw cold water on Trump envoy Steve Witkoff’s claim that Iran was “probably a week away from having industrial-grade bomb-making material.”

“I’ve been hearing the Iranians are a year away from being able to strike the United States for 25 years,” says Jon Alterman says on the SpyTalk podcast.

As a senior official with the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff during the Clinton administration and later as a member of the Chief of Naval Operations Executive Panel at the Pentagon, Alterman has been dealing with the Iranians— and questions of Iran’s nuclear program and related issues—for more than 30 years. And he’s rarely seen a time more perilous than this one.

Even as Trump holds out the promise of negotiations— “my preference is to solve this problem through diplomacy,” the president said during his State of the Union speech, while adding on Friday, “we haven’t made a final decision” on whether to attack—the Pentagon’s military buildup in the region continues at a striking pace, with at least 16 ships, including two aircraft carriers, six guided missile destroyers, and more than 100 fighter jets, including F-35s, F-22’s and F-15’s having left their bases in the U.S. and Europe, and headed to the Mideast.

(The Associated Press reported that the U.S. has also moved 12 F-22 stealth fighters to a base in Israel. As if to underscore the danger, U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee told U.S. Embassy workers that if they wanted to leave the country, they “should do so TODAY.”)

But Alterman sees little chance the Iranians will capitulate on their nuclear program, much less abandon their missiles, and give Trump the deal he wants.

“They see folding as surrendering, which weakens them,” said Alterman. “And instead they’re [calculating] six months from now, where do we want to be? And how do we demonstrate—look, we survived this American onslaught— we’re the ones who defied Donald Trump. And how do we use that to further secure ourselves?”

Indeed, Iran’s nuclear program is, says Alterman, “the goose that laid the golden egg.” It makes the regime — for all its brutality and apparently sinking domestic support—all the more relevant and forces the U.S. and European partners to pay attention and negotiate with it. But the Iranian regime has little incentive to cut a deal limiting, much less eliminating, its enrichment of uranium, which was well above civilian use levels when the U.S. struck Iran last June and, according to Trump, “obliterated” its nuclear program.

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(As Trump indicated in his State of the Union speech, the “obliteration” is no longer operative. Or at least the Iranians didn’t get the message. “We wiped it out and they want to start all over again. And are at this moment again pursuing their sinister ambitions,” he said in his address.)

All of which leaves Trump and his team in a bind. Trump got elected vowing to keep the country out of “forever wars” like those in Iraq and Afghanistan. And Vice President J.D. Vance told the Washington Post on Friday that, even while the U.S. might strike Iran, “there is no chance” the U.S. will end up in another drawn out war.

An infamous portrait of Secretary of State Colin Powell making false claims about Iraqi WMD at the United Nations, backed by CIA Director George Tenet and UN Ambassador John Negroponte. (ABC News)

But the alignment of forces in the Mideast — with the heaviest U.S. firepower in the region in decades facing multiple ways the Iranians could retaliate against U.S. troops, Israel and even U.S. citizens traveling abroad—suggests that Vance’s breezy confidence might be considerably overstated.

Alterman sees little chance the Iranians will capitulate on their nuclear program, much less abandon their missiles, and give Trump the deal he wants.

“What they’re telegraphing is we have lots of options and we will use them,” Alterman said in the SpyTalk podcast. Given that the Trump administration at times seems to have set the ultimate goal as regime change, “I think that prompts the Iranians to think more creatively about how to really demonstrate their ability to hurt others, whether it’s attacking shipping, attacking American troops, attacking allied troops, attacking American facilities…plus the whole issue of proxies, plus the whole issue of terrorist attacks against soft targets....

“If they feel they’re going down in a serious way, it’s hard for me to imagine they wouldn’t, A, try to go down fighting, and B, try to go down in such a way that got the Americans to think twice about the wisdom of this,” Altermann continued, “to get the American public to say, what are you really doing?”

All of which means the next few weeks, or possibly days, could be the most hair-raising moments the Mideast has seen in years.

“It feels to me like we may be on the brink of the most consequential foreign policy decision of the Trump administration,” said Alterman. “The president will go into this. It would be a war of choice— and it could end up very, very poorly for him.” ###

Michael Isikoff is co-author with David Corn of Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal and the Selling of the Iraq War.

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