“Iran posed no threat” is the sentence with which John Kiriakou answered a viewer who asked, sympathetically, why he and his co-host were so opposed to the 2026 attack and whether Iran was not extremely dangerous if left alone.
The chain of negatives
Kiriakou’s answer was structured as a series of removals. “Iran posed no threat to the United States. None. None. It had no nuclear weapon. It had no nuclear weapons program.”[1]
He grounds that in institutional findings rather than opinion: “That was confirmed twice by the CIA and by the International Atomic Energy Agency.”[1]
To the absence of a programme he adds the absence of an intention — “And didn’t want one” — and the religious prohibition: “And there was a fatwa against developing one.”[1]
The last removal concerns capability even on the contrary assumption: “And even if they had one, they didn’t have a delivery system to to deliver it.”[1][2]
The question that follows
With the threat removed, Kiriakou treats the war as requiring some other explanation, and supplies one. “So, um you know, why are we doing Israel’s dirty work for it? If the Israelis want to attack Iran, then go ahead and attack Iran. But why did we have to do it? Why are Americans dying in the name of Israeli foreign policy?”[2]
That framing runs through his commentary on the war: he identifies Marco Rubio and Benjamin Netanyahu as the two figures actually driving the policy, and describes chaos, not disarmament, as the Israeli objective.[3][4]
The irony
The consequence Kiriakou finds most pointed is that the war destroyed its own premise. Asked about the oddity of waging a war over nuclear weapons and killing the leader who had issued the ruling against them, his response was “Exactly right” — followed by the prediction that the next supreme leader “is just going to issue a new fatwa revoking the old fatwa and calling for a nuclear uh uh weapons program.”[5]