Joe Kent: Iran Was Not On The Verge Of Obtaining A Nuclear Weapon; They Weren’t In June Either
Former National Counterterrorism Center Director Joe Kent talks about Iran’s nuclear capabilities in an interview with Tucker Carlson.
TUCKER CARLSON: Was Iran on the verge of getting a nuclear weapon? FORMER NATIONAL COUNTERTERRORISM CENTER DIRECTOR JOE KENT: No, they weren’t, you know, three weeks ago when this started, and they weren’t in June either. I mean, the Iranians have had a religious ruling, a fatwa, against actually developing a nuclear weapon since 2004. That’s been in place since 2004. That’s available in the public sphere, but then also we had no intelligence to indicate that that fatwa was being disobeyed, or it was on the cusp of being lifted. The Iranian strategy, it’s actually pretty pragmatic. The Iranians are obviously aware of what’s taking place in their region, and their strategy was to not completely abandon their nuclear program, because they saw what happened to Muammar Qaddafi in Libya. When he said, hey, I’ve got no more nukes, I’ll do what you say, I’ll give up my nukes. And we gave him the Nobel Peace Prize? Yeah, we regime changed him, and he was, you know, executed by his own people in the most horrific way. CARLSON: Oh, sodomized by a bayonet, great. KENT: So that’s the lesson, I think, that the entire region took from that, when Hillary Clinton Unfortunately, that is what the neocon, neoliberal warmongers, that’s the lesson that they showed everyone in the region. And then conversely, the Iranians also knew that if they came out and said, okay, we’ve got a nuke, whether they were bluffing or not, Saddam Hussein, Iraq right next door. And he hung, I think. He was hung by his own people, you know, after a bloody, you know, war that’s still essentially going on inside of Iraq. So the Iranians’ position when viewed from the lens of the region was actually fairly pragmatic. They were preventing, you know, themselves from developing a bomb, but they still wanted the ability. They wanted the ability to enrich. They wanted the ability to have some components so that they weren’t completely stripped of it. And we always assess that they were either several months or a year, two years away from actually being able to develop a nuclear weapon. And that’s not because the Iranians are stupid people. I think we can tell right now that the Iranians are anything but stupid. They had the ability, I think, the brainpower to actually develop one, or they could have simply traded a ton of oil with Pakistan or with someone else to actually get a nuclear weapon. They were not doing that. We had no intelligence to indicate that they were.
