Tehran, November 18: The US, pushed by the “Zionist apparatus,” is seeking to use the Saudi envoy assassination accusation against Tehran as a pretext to launch an attack on Iran, a political analyst tells Media.
The remarks were made by Jeffery Steinberg, the editor of Washington-based Executive Intelligence Review, on Thursday.
He was referring to the recent claim by the US which accused Iran of planning to assassinate Saudi Arabia’s Ambassador to Washington, Adel al-Jubeir, with help from a man suspected of being a member of a Mexican drug cartel. Iran, however, has rejected the accusation.
Although the credibility of the allegation has been questioned, even by the US media, Washington and Riyadh launched a joint push on Wednesday by bringing up the issue again in a draft resolution presented to the United Nations General Assembly.
In another scenario, the International Atomic Energy Agency has recently published a report in which the body, under the influence of Western powers and Israel, accuses Iran of pursuing military objectives in its nuclear program, a claim strongly rejected by Tehran.
Steinberg said the continued efforts by the US are reminiscent of “the build-up towards the March 2003(US-led) attack on Iraq and this time the target is Iran.”
“A group of neo-conservatives and right-wing Zionists in the United States and in Israel prepared a report called ‘clean break’ in which they said there are four countries that are targeted for regime change. Those four countries were Iraq, Syria, Iran and Libya and if you just do the math, I think what we are seeing is the continuation of that project,” Steinberg added.
“Unfortunately President Obama from the very outset surrounded himself with representatives of that whole Zionist apparatus,” he told Media.
The analyst noted that the White House officials under administration of former US President George W. Bush planned to topple the Iraqi regime, therefore they attacked Iraq in 2003 under the pretext that the Arab country had Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD).
“It was mushroom clouds threatened by Iraq’s so-called nuclear weapons, WMD program, that proved after the war, after the overthrow of the regime, to have been completely fabricated,” Steinberg explained.
He also called the US-fabricated assassination plot a “silly ridiculous story.”
“It was so embarrassingly transparently a hoax that even the American media — that usually bends over backwards for any piece of propaganda like this — could not risk their own credibility by giving any credibility to the silly ridiculous story,” he said.
The US and Israel have repeatedly threatened Iran with the “option” of a military strike, based on their allegation that Iran’s nuclear program may include a covert military aspect.
Tehran insists that it has the right to develop and acquire nuclear technology for peaceful purposes as a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and a member of the International Atomic Energy Agency.
——Agencies