According to former Swiss intelligence officer Jacques Baud, the USA and Israel are pursuing strategic goals in the conflict with Iran that go beyond the officially stated nuclear program. “There are many reasons that are linked together in a complex way,” says Baud in an interview Current events in focus.
Kostas Maros for World Week
Baud explicitly distinguishes between “deeper reasons and the pretexts”. There has been an ongoing “obsession with Iran” in the USA since 1979. Israel only declared Iran its main enemy after the Iraq War in 2003. Since then, the focus has been on the nuclear threat, although there are “no territorial claims, no economic rivalries” and therefore “no objective conflict” between the two states.
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Baud considers the Iranian nuclear program to have long since ended. In 2003, Tehran decided “that the benefits of a nuclear bomb would be smaller than the problems” and canceled the project. Later assessments confirmed “that Iran has not started a new nuclear weapons program since the program was discontinued in 2003.” Nevertheless, the opposite representation persists. Baud speaks of “disinformation from our media that has its origins in Israel.”
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He also sees external influence in the unrest in Iran. The protests were “completely controlled by the USA”, including through support for opposition groups and economic pressure. Official casualty figures were also exaggerated.
The West underestimates the country’s military resilience. The Iranian defense functions as a “mosaic defense” with a decentralized structure. In addition, it is wrong to assume that the population will quickly turn against the leadership. Rather, it shows that she “clearly supports the government”.
Basically, Baud believes the West’s image of Iran is distorted: “Our image of Iran is the result of over 40 years of American disinformation to justify war.”
The statements reflect the view of a single expert and contradict the assessments of Western governments, which continue to classify Iran as a security threat.
