Iran hawks over the years have made plenty of bad arguments against Barack Obama’s nuclear deal—Lindsey Graham said at one point it would be “akin to declaring war on Israel”—yet the most popular was always that the agreement would significantly reduce Iran’s breakout time. The breakout time is how long it takes a country to generate enough highly enriched uranium in order to build an atomic weapon. The argument was that, because the Iran deal allowed Tehran to keep any centrifuges at all, the Iranians would keep perfecting their technology until they were on the cusp of a bomb.

As Omri Ceren screamed at the time, “The international community will literally be investing in helping Iran achieve a zero breakout.”

This was nonsense, of course, but it also obscured another crucial point: even if you’ve enriched the uranium, it doesn’t mean you’ve built the weapon. So how far away from an actual nuclear bomb is Iran? The New York Times this week has some good news:

At the same time, a new intelligence assessment by Israel’s military said that if Iran chose to build a bomb, it would need about two years, partly because it lacks all the components and technical ability. The assessment contrasts with the more alarmist assertions made by both Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and top members of the new U.S. administration, and suggests there may be diplomatic breathing room to avert a showdown.

In fairness, one reason Israel believes Iran is so far away from a bomb is that the Israelis assassinated a key Iranian nuclear scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, last year. Yet that still leaves several years in the interim during which Iran was supposed to be feverishly hammering together nuclear weapon technology. That they didn’t, that the Cassandras of 2015 were wrong once again, is heartening. And all the more so when you consider that Iran was already enriching uranium and conducting research beyond what was allowed in the deal. It announced those violations back in 2019 in response to Donald Trump’s pulling out of the agreement. All that and it’s still two years away.

It’s yet another reminder that the Netanyahu quarter of the foreign policy blabosphere has never been right about anything. All the way back in 1992, Benjamin Netanyahu told the Israeli Knesset that Iran was “three to five years” away from a nuclear weapon. After Bill Clinton’s presidency notably came and went without Manhattan being vaporized, Netanyahu only stepped up his fearmongering. His goal was clear: to buffalo the United States into destroying the Iranian regime, which Israel considers to be its primary foe. He didn’t get that, but he did help persuade the last American president to yank the plug on a perfectly good nuclear agreement. It was the abrogation of that deal, not its implementation, that led Iran to violate its terms.

Now, Joe Biden says he wants the United States to reenter the agreement once again. He’s currently locked in a standoff with Tehran, which insists it won’t return to the negotiating table until he lifts sanctions while he insists he won’t lift sanctions until Iran returns to the negotiating table. However that shakes out, I hope Biden is able to deliver. Our feud with Iran is one of the dumbest parts of our foreign policy, a relic of the Cold War that should have been retired the minute we declared war on our mutual enemy the Taliban. Those who were suckered by a Looney Tunes bomb on an easel do not now get to continue dictating policy. Rather than listen to them, Biden should seek peace.