It’s now clear to the U.S., as it has been to the rest of the world for some time now, that nuclear war with Iran shouldn’t even be in the public dialogue because it doesn’t have the ability to wage such a war. Whether on purpose or otherwise, Bush has been spreading threats irresponsibly to focus the nation’s attention on a perceived, overblown threat abroad.

In 2005, U.S. intelligence officials presented the country and world with a slide show drawn from pages downloaded from a stolen Iranian laptop computer that detailed efforts to build a compact warhead for an Iranian missile, according to New York Times reports. The U.S. officials presented this as evidence that Iran was trying to work out the technology to create nuclear weapons.

While some European and U.N. officials were skeptical about the 2005 report, saying it was possible to fabricate that kind of data, the new intelligence report does not suggest the estimate was fabricated. Much of the new report is still classified, however.

Of course, Iran still is a powerful country with radical anti-U.S. sentiment running rampant through much of the population. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has grown increasingly bold and inflammatory as Bush’s war plans have become more calculated and violent in the Middle East. With its unruly leader, Iran is still dangerous to our interests, and we should keep an eye on the nation. Iran didn’t pose an immediate threat, and the subsequent fear and anti-Iran sentiment running strong in the U.S. was largely misplaced.

Perhaps people in the U.S. should have seen this coming — the administration made the same false intelligence claims about Iraq. The truth eventually came out that Iraq had no such weapon technologies or capabilities, but the damage had already been done. The U.S. invaded Iraq on March 19, 2003, with no end to the conflict in sight to this day.

Whether on purpose or not, the Bush administration inaccurately instilled fear and prejudice against Iran into the U.S. mind-set. This administration has made a sport of demonizing people to instill fear in the U.S., which in the end supports the Republican Party, the party traditionally interested in funding military and war efforts. Unfortunately, because this culture of fear is so strongly ingrained into the mind-set of the average U.S. citizen, even the Democratic Party has followed suit. Democratic presidential hopefuls have made a point to come out as strong against Iran as their Republican counterparts.

This newest discovery about Iran presents important lessons about the importance of certainty and competent intelligence. Hopefully the government will begin placing more weight on accuracy than fearmongering to promote an agenda.