December 29, 2017
The leader of every Arab country plus Israel asked the United States to bomb Iran when Barack Obama served as president, former Secretary of State John Kerry told a gathering in London last week.
“[Israeli] Prime Minister [Binyamin] Netanyahu was urging President Obama to bomb Iran,” Kerry said, but did not clarify exactly when that request was made.
“Every leader I met with in the region,… [including then Egyptian President Hosni] Mubarak, personally, to my face, said, ‘You have to bomb Iran, that is the only thing they understand and that is the only way you will stop them having a nuclear weapon’,” Kerry recalled.
But Kerry expressed his doubts over this widely-shared notion, saying, “Bombing Iran does not necessarily stop them from having a nuclear weapon. It is the same dilemma that we face with North Korea. We do not know where everything is.”
At the time that the nuclear deal was put in place, Iran did not have a nuclear weapon, Kerry emphasized.
“I guarantee you, once you bomb the country, you have surely given them a good reason to want to have a weapon,” the ex-secretary of state asserted.
Prior to the agreement Iran could have “dug two miles deep into a mountain” to create a facility to produce a nuclear weapon and should Tehran be bombed, it would be moved to do so, he added.
Kerry spoke last Tuesday, just four days after Netanyahu spoke to the same group at Chatham House about Iran. The former secretary of state gave a rousing defense of the 2015 nuclear deal.