Donald Trump’s lies regarding the range of Iranian missiles

Yesterday, the peaceful Islamic Republic lobbed a warhead 4,000 km (2,500 miles) from Iran to Diego Garcia (WSJ).

Let’s compare to “In Trump’s Case for War, a Series of False or Unproven Claims” (New York Times, last month; note that a “False Claim” might be construed by some people as “Lie”):

American and European government officials, international weapons monitoring groups and reports from American intelligence agencies give a far different picture of the urgency of the Iran threat than the one the White House has presented in recent days.

… in his State of the Union address on Tuesday, Mr. Trump made a new claim, saying Iran was “working to build missiles that will soon reach the United States of America.”

The following day, Mr. Rubio repeated the president’s assertion about Iran’s work on intercontinental ballistic missiles, although he used different language about how quickly Iran could be capable of hitting the United States. While Mr. Trump said it would be “soon,” Mr. Rubio said it would be “one day.”

A report by the Defense Intelligence Agency last year concluded that Iran did not have ballistic missiles capable of hitting the United States, and that it might take as long as a decade for it to have up to 60 intercontinental ballistic missiles.

… 16 years later, there is still no evidence that Iran has made its long-range missile program a top priority.

Instead, Iran has put far greater focus on building up its arsenal of short- and medium-range missiles, believing it could be the most effective deterrent against Israeli or American efforts to overthrow the government in Tehran.

“Trump Iranian missile claim unsupported by U.S. intelligence, say sources” (Reuters, last month):

The New York Times first reported that U.S. intelligence agencies believe Iran is probably years away from having missiles that can hit the United States.

Without providing evidence, Trump said that Tehran was beginning to rebuild the nuclear program that he claimed had been “obliterated” by U.S. airstrikes last June on three major sites involved with uranium enrichment.

In an interview with India Today TV released on Wednesday, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi denied that Iran was expanding its missile capabilities. “We are not developing long range missiles. We have limited range to below 2000 kilometers intentionally,” he said. “We don’t want it to be a global threat. We only have (them) to defend ourselves. Our missiles build deterrence.”

Now that the Iranians actually do have missiles capable of reaching Paris and London, how long before (1) the French surrender, and (2) the Islamic Republic of the UK merges with the Islamic Republic of Iran to form the United Islamic Republic of Britain and Iran?

The map from a few days ago:

The map from today (Daily Mail):

I still can’t figure out why the U.S. hasn’t targeted Iran’s oil production and electric power plants. So long as Iran is exporting oil it can build new missile factories whenever it wants to and so long as Iran has electric power it can plug those new missile factories into the grid for 24×7 operation. If there isn’t a realistic possibility of a friendly government in Iran how can it make sense to leave the current government in control of a functional export economy?