The undertow of anti-Iranian fearmongering becomes stronger. This is a tremendous bit of totally baseless fearmongering from an Obama administration official in the New York Times, positing nuclear bomb collaboration between Iran and North Korea:

The Iranians are also pursuing uranium enrichment, and one senior American official said two weeks ago that “it’s very possible that the North Koreans are testing for two countries.” Some believe that the country may have been planning two simultaneous tests, but it could take time to sort out the data.

This is on a par withthe Bush administration’s totally false claim of links between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaida. There is no linkage between the governments of Iran and North Korea; both regimes are highly unpleasant in many ways, but they have utterly conflicting ideologies and absolutely zero history of political collaboration. This is ludicrous scaremongering fantasy.

New CIA haed John Brennan put Iran and North Korea into the same sentence with nuclear weapons in his Senate confirmation hearing. This aspect was overlooked by the mainstream media, which focused on Brennans defence of drone killings (and ludicrous claims of absence of bystander deaths). But Ray McGovern rightfully picked up on this part of his opening statement:

“regimes in Tehran and Pyongyang remain bent on pursuing nuclear weapons”.

As Ray points out, the US intelligence services own assessment is that while Pyongyang plainly is developing nuclear weapons, the situation in Tehran is much more nuanced. There is no clear intention of Iran to develop nuclear weapons. That Brennan gives a position at variance with the actual analysis of the agency he is to head is worrying, to say the least.

We have the same seamless and completely unjustified linguistic waving together of North Korean and Iranian nuclear programmes from former Israeli Foreign Minister and Netanyahu prop Liebermann quoted here:

Former Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman says North Korea’s nuclear test was an “obvious example” of diplomacy failing to curb a nuclear program. Lieberman told Army Radio on Wednesday that “anyone who thinks sanctions or negotiations will stop Iran is wrong.”

Iran remains the best justification for bloated military budgets and the next obvious target for war profiteers and hydrocarbon vultures. Expect a crescendo of this nonsense this summer/