Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare

Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare is a 2014 book authored by Gareth Porter, an American historian, investigative journalist, author and policy analyst specializing in U.S. national security policy. In this 310-page book, he asserts that Iran's nuclear energy program has been peaceful, arguing that the evidence widely cited to demonstrate Iran's nuclear weapons ambitions is fabricated by Israel and the United States.

Contents

The book consists of the following chapters:

The US Denial Policy and Its Consequences

The Politics of Iran’s Nuclear Secrecy

Iran’s Unknown Nuclear Politics

US Political Origins of the Nuclear Scare

Israeli Political Origins of the Nuclear Scare

Choosing Regime Change Over Diplomacy

The IAEA Comes Up Empty

The Mystery of the Laptop Documents

Intelligence Failure

The Phantom Bomb Test Chamber of Parchin

Phony War Crises

Synopsis

Starting with "U.S. support for the Iraqis during the 1980s Iraq–Iran War", the book argues that with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the ending of the Cold War, Americans saved the CIA by giving it a new reason to exist, the new threat posed by the combination of "weapons of mass destruction" and "terror". Taking seriously the declarations of Ali Khamenei, Iran's supreme leader, and of his predecessor, Ruhollah Khomeini, that nuclear weapons are against teachings of Islam and hence Iran is not seeking them, Porter says that the pressure by U.S. to prevent Tehran's development of its civilian nuclear program left them with only the Hobson's choice of working covertly and covering their tracks.

According to John Waterbury, "The risk for Israel and the United States, of course, is that they might have to go to war to confront a threat that, Porter alleges, they know does not exist."

According to the Fars News Agency, in addition to explaining why Tehran covered its nuclear activity, the author deals with the issues such as the alleged smuggled laptop, Parchin test chamber and the role of Israel in creating the crisis.

Porter argues in his book that the root of the crisis is in fact "Washington's denial of Iran's right to a peaceful nuclear program" and not "Iran's defiance of the nuclear nonproliferation treaty."

Reception

According to Al-Monitor columnist Akiva Eldar, a number of contentions in Porter's book have been independently made by Uzi Eilam, a senior intelligence source who won the Israel Security Prize and served in the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission as a director for nine years. Senior Israeli security officials said Eilam was not aware of recent information and that he is "out of the loop".

Shmuel Meir, a research fellow at the Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University and former researcher at the IDF's intelligence unit and the IDF’s Planning Department strategic unit, called Porter "the only journalist and investigator in the world who read, with an unbiased eye, all the IAEA reports and the American intelligence reports of the last several decades regarding the Iranian issue" and said that the book was "highly detailed and well-documented" and suitable for "all interested in understanding how we arrived at the Iranian nuclear crisis, and the 'attack scenarios', and invented facts and intelligence reports whose purpose was to support the preconceptions".

Josh Ruebner in Foreign Policy in Focus wrote that the book is "meticulously researched and richly detailed". Among Porter's conclusions is one that regards the efforts to include Iran's ballistic missiles within the nuclear negotiations after the interim deal was signed without them as "an Israeli-inspired monkey wrench thrown by its lobby ...