BOOK REVIEW – Gareth Porter: A Manufactured Crisis
January 31, 2014
by Peter Jenkins
The subtitle of Gareth Porters new book, The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare, is well-chosen. Large parts of A Manufactured Crisis are indeed untold till now. They amount to what the author terms an alternative narrative.
But dont be misled by alternative. This is not the work of some crank who imagines conspiracies where none exist. One senses, rather, from the authors meticulous sourcing and the extent of his research that what motivates him is a fierce hunger for truth and aversion to deceit.
Porter has been investigating the Iranian nuclear case for the best part of a decade. The result of his researches is both a fascinating addition to a growing corpus, unlike any previous work on the issue, and a disturbing indictment of US and Israeli policies.
One central theme is that hidden motives have coloured these policies. On the US side, Porter explains, the end of the Cold War led to a federal bureaucratic interest in exaggerating the WMD and missile threat posed by Iran (and other emerging countries) to justify funding bids. During the presidency of George W. Bush some senior administration members also sought to exploit nuclear fears to delegitimize the Iranian government and engineer a pretext for enforced regime change.
http://beforeitsnews.com/middle-east/2014/01/book-review-gareth-porter-a-manufactured-crisis-2456802.html