In something that sounds straight out of the Babylong Bee, the Israeli government has shared intelligence with the United States asserting that Iran is readying chemical weapons to use against adversaries.
And all of this is being floated in the pages of the New York Times, and on election day no less... A more on the nose script couldn't be written - very much like this one...
Apparently fully aware of this, the NY Times story authors underscore in their Tuesday afternoon headline that "Israeli Claims of Iranian Chemical Weapons Divide U.S. Officials."
This is given that the information was "met with alarm by some American officials and deep skepticism by others, according to U.S. and regional officials."
Stating the obvious: "Some American officials see the Israeli intelligence as part of a pressure campaign by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government to persuade the Trump administration to return to major combat operations against Iran."
However, "Other officials believe the threats should be taken seriously, given the recent array of warnings about Iran’s preparations to attack American interests."
And the Gulf allies are skeptical for all the obvious reasons as well:
Israel has shared some of the information with officials in Gulf countries. Several doubted that Iran was developing plans to use chemical weapons and believe Israel is trying to push the United States and its partners to return to a more intense phase of the war.
It was well-known that Iran initated an apparently short-lived chemical weapons program starting in the early to mid 1980s as a direct result to extensive chemical attacks by Saddam Hussein's forces in the context of the Iran-Iraq War. However, Tehran soon after said it abandoned the program.
Chemical weapons are widely viewed as largely ineffective relative to conventional munitions, especially when it comes to using them on distant or wide battlefields - or anything but relatively confined spaces or areas. They tend to be seen as more a weapon of psychological terror than anything else.
For Israeli officials, it's enough to just float the evidence-free claim, and the MSM news cycle will pick it up...
A further irony in all this is that the Israelis and the NY Times apparently think everyone simply forgot that they floated the exact narrative concerning Iraq and "WMD" in the lead-up to the 2003 US invasion. We were treated to diagrams of 'mobile chemical weapons' labs and other propaganda, later proven to be completely false.