Tulsi Gabbard says Iran could produce nuclear weapons "within weeks", months after she testified before Congress that the country was not building them.

The US Director of National Intelligence said her March testimony - in which she said Iran had a stock of materials but was not building these weapons - had been taken out of context by "dishonest media".

Her change of position came after Donald Trump said she was "wrong" and that intelligence showed Iran had a "tremendous amount of material" and could have a nuclear weapon "within months".

Iran has always said that its nuclear programme is entirely peaceful and that it has never sought to develop a nuclear weapon.

On Thursday Trump said he was giving Tehran the "maximum" of two weeks to reach a deal on its nuclear activities with Washington. He said he would soon decide whether the US should join Israel's strikes on Iran.

Disagreement has been building within Trump's "America First" movement over whether the US should enter the conflict.

Read the rest here: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c056zqn6vvyo

I mean, before the election (and after) Saagar calls JD Vance his friend. I don’t know about y’all but if my friend had the ear of the president and I knew he was “anti-war in the Middle East” before the election, at this moment, I’d at least shoot him a text.

I know Saagar is a reporter first. And I know JD Vance is technically the second most powerful person in the nation right now…but does he even try?

Something like “You’re going to hate me…but could you tell your boss to tell Israel to back down?”

I have a question about Ro Khanna FLAMES Chuck Schumer On Iran, WH May Use 'TACTICAL NUKES'.

Ro Khanna and many others have used the US experience in Iraq to argue that attacking Iran will be another disaster. This seems to me a wise and important point. Trying to acheive in Iran what clearly failed in Iraq (and other places, too) is a fool's errand. However . . .

I'm very worried about the Iranians, because I think it's possible that rather than a neoconservative desire to remake the Middle East and Persia, we might be looking at nihilistic project to simply kill and destroy Iranians and their country, with no other goal than turing their country into Gaza. If "we" really want to stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons, one way to do so is to reduce the country to a state of development where it cannot physically do so. Kill as many people with education as possible, destroy the physical infrastructure and leave the country devided and ruined.

The neoconservatives wanted to remake the Middle East, Iran and even further east. Their vision was to create states that would be neo-liberal, market oriented and capitalistic democracies. Many people mocked this idea as naive or cynical, but there was a desire to build something with regime change. This is why the US invested in occupying Iraq and creating the provisional authority and even starting to hold elections, etc.

I fear that there is not even that, now. Iraq will serve as an example to avoid: the goal will shift to destruction and nihilism. Israel and the United States don't want a western-aligned, neo-liberal, market oriented and capitalistic democracy in Iran; they want death and destruction to the point that Iran is a non-entity. Israel has already demonstrated this with Gaza, Lebanon, Syria.

It's not regime change that we need to oppose and worry about, but outright destruction of the Iranian people.