The Allegation that Iran is Developing Nuclear Weapons is a Mirage

The Allegation that Iran is Developing Nuclear Weapons is a Mirage

from Dissident Voice by Kourosh Ziabari

Dr. Arshin Adib-Moghaddam is a political commentator and lecturer in the comparative and international politics of western Asia at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He was born in the Taksim area of Istanbul to Iranian parents and raised in Hamburg, Germany. He studied at the University of Hamburg, American University and Cambridge. He is the author of The International Politics of the Persian Gulf: A Cultural Genealogy, Iran in World Politics: The Question of the Islamic Republic, and A metahistory of the Clash of Civilisations.
He is an Honorary Fellow of the University of Cambridge’s European Trust Society and he was the first Jarvis Doctorow Fellow at St Edmund Hall, University of Oxford.
His latest book, A Metahistory of the Clash of Civilisations: Us and Them Beyond Orientalism was published in 2011 by Hurst & Co. and Columbia University Press.

"I think Chomsky is right when he says that it is Iran’s insistence on an independent foreign policy that is being punished. The allegation that Iran is developing nuclear weapons is a Trojan horse to legitimise the comprehensive sanctions regime and to contain Iran’s regional power. Having said that, I don’t believe that Iran is facing a coherent ‘western’ block. Even in the United States, where the image of Iran is professionally manufactured by anti-Iranian lobbying groups, there are differences of opinion on how to engage the country. There is a difference between Barak Obama and George W. Bush. In Europe too, we have been engaged in fostering a different kind of approach to Iran, one that is not reliant on myths, but the reality on the ground."