America planned September 11. John McCain supports the Islamic State. Jews are sorcerers.

A top Iranian general’s recent claim that the U.S. staged the 9/11 attacks as an excuse to invade the Muslim world may seem crazy. But it might not be the nuttiest-sounding thing a prominent Iranian has said in recent months.


Iran’s hard-line religious and military leaders routinely make crackpot accusations against the U.S. and its allies, propagating wild theories that would be laughable if they didn’t have real implications for U.S.-Iranian relations and Barack Obama’s effort to strike a nuclear deal.

Conservatives in Washington insist that such talk reveals the true nature of the Iranian regime. On Thursday, House Speaker John Boehner cited the claim of Iranian general Ahmad Reza Pourdastan — that the U.S. “plan[ed] and carr[ied] out the events of 9/11, in order to justify their presence” in the Middle East — as cause for alarm.

“This should [not] be taken lightly or silently, as the Obama administration would apparently have us do,” Boehner said.

Obama officials say they don’t feel the need to respond to every off-the-wall comment from Tehran. Doing so, after all, would amount to something like a full-time job.

The creative thinking comes from Iran’s highest levels. In a 2011 speech to the United Nations, for instance, Iran’s previous president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, also implied that the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks may have been self-inflicted, calling them “a mystery.” Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has repeatedly said that the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant was deliberately created by the west. The alleged goal: to divide Muslims and bomb their countries.

In case the point wasn’t clear enough, Iranian state television recently claimed that Sen. John McCain met personally with Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the Sunni militant group’s self-declared caliph. The television network broadcast doctored images of the hawkish Republican last September, as an announcer declared: “These say more than a thousand words regarding the links between the United States and this group.”

In an address last September, Khamenei added that the West also created Al Qaeda and the Taliban, groups he called “the handicraft of colonialists,” in order to counter Iran.

Some Middle East analysts note that Iran has no monopoly on outlandish political discourse. “You can find conspiracy theories in politics everywhere,” said Matthew Duss, president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace. “In the U.S., lots of people don’t believe that Barack Obama was born in America.”

“It’s a bit silly to get riled up about this,” said Trita Parsi, president of the National Iranian American Council, who called it a common belief in the Middle East that American power drives major events. “The Saudis at really high levels say that the U.S. invaded Iraq on behalf of Iran,” Parsi added.

But U.S. conservatives warn against making excuses for what they call the true nature of the Iranian regime.

“Of course there are idiots everywhere, including in Iran,” said Danielle Pletka, a scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. “But the fact that this fits into a pattern of aggressive statements against the United States — and against Israel and Jews — should be more troubling to the president and his administration. I don’t know why it isn’t.”

“You’d like to put it down to some kind of psychological sickness,” Pletka added. “But it’s not.”

It’s not hard to understand why Iranians might be unusually sensitive to foreign plots and influence. Russia and Britain divided the country into spheres of influence in the early 1900s. In 1953, a U.S.-led coup toppled Iran’s prime minister, who nationalized the country’s British-owned oil holdings and flirted with Soviet communism, replacing him with the harshly repressive Shah Reza Pahlavi. After denying involvement in the coup for decades, the CIA finally acknowledged its role two years ago.

The 1979 Islamic revolution that overthrew the Shah was fueled by anti-Western, anti-colonial ideology, and analysts say Iran’s conservative leaders may exaggerate their mistrust for the U.S. in part to justify their hold on power.

Since then, the CIA has been a convenient scapegoat for Iran’s Islamic leaders. Officials in Tehran have defended the 1979 takeover of the U.S. Embassy on the grounds that the CIA was using the compound to prepare a new coup in the country.

And when mass protests against the clerical regime erupted throughout Iran in June of 2009, Khamenei denounced them as a foreign attempt to overthrow his government. In fact, one reason President Barack Obama did little to assist the Green Movement was to avoid lending credibility to that.

The charge of treachery was easier to level in July 1988, when a U.S. naval vessel shot down Iran Air flight 655, killing 290 people aboard, after mistaking it for a hostile military jet. An Iranian government report later called the shoot down a “deliberate act,” and Tehran continues to describe the disaster that way.

On Thursday, House Speaker John Boehner cited the claim of Iranian general Ahmad Reza Pourdastan — that the U.S. “plan[ed] and carr[ied] out the events of 9/11, in order to justify their presence” in the Middle East — as cause for alarm. | Getty

“If the commander of the warship made a mistake, why did you not bring him to trial?” Khamenei asked in a tweet addressed to the U.S. on the anniversary of the tragedy last July.

Senior Obama administration officials say the nuclear talks are complicated by Khamenei’s view that the U.S. has manufactured a crisis around Iran’s nuclear program as a pretext for regime change.

“They created the myth of nuclear weapons so they could say the Islamic Republic is a source of threat,” Khamenei told an audience of military commanders earlier this month.

Iranian reformers, by contrast, tend to eschew such conspiratorial talk. Iran’s foreign minister, for instance, has offered an interpretation of America’s role in the rise of ISIL that even many Obama administration officials wouldn’t dispute: that ISIL is a product of the 2003 U.S. occupation of Iraq.

“If you look at the essence of [ISIL] it’s the product of foreign invasion,” Javad Zarif told the Council on Foreign Relations last September. “Foreign presence in any territory creates a dynamic for demagogues like [ISIL] to use the resentment in the population.”

That illustrates why U.S. officials are pushing to complete a nuclear deal with Iran despite the hard-liners and their conspiracies: A successful pact could boost the standing of the moderates — in part by demonstrating that the West can be a trustworthy partner.

Even if that strategy works,it’s unlikely to quickly affect views of Israel, about which no theory is too oddball for Iran’s conservatives and some state news outlets.

In December, Iran’s semi-official Fars News Agency reported that Israeli businessmen had been purchasing land in ISIL-held areas of northern Iraq, with plans for eventual Jewish settlements there. Fars quoted one unnamed source saying that 2,000 Jews had already settled in the Kurdistan region of Iraq.

And during an appearance on state TV last July, Valiollah Naghipourfar, an Iranian cleric and professor at Tehran University, calmly asserted that Israel’s vaunted intelligence-gathering prowess is fueled by supernatural powers.

“The Jew is very practiced in sorcery,” the cleric told the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting network. “Indeed,” he added, “most sorcerers are Jews.”