We’re at war over weapons of mass destruction that may or may not exist in a Middle Eastern country.
If only my age could go backward like American foreign policy.
Instead of Iraq and Saddam Hussein, this time it is Iran and the Supreme Leader. But once again, we are going to war (or some level of war-like acts) on the blind faith – and in direct opposition to our national intelligence services – that Iran has developed a nuclear weapon, or that it was working towards such a goal.
There is zero evidence of this.
Israel certainly believed it to be true, but then, Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu has been warning that Iran was just “weeks away” from developing a nuclear weapon for more than 13 years now. No, really. There’s video of the man declaring with all sincerity back in 2012 that Iran was so very close to possessing the capability to annihilate the rest of the Middle East. He did it again in 2013. In 2015. And in 2018.
He has never been right.
Instead, Iran appeared to be abiding by most of the 2015 agreement it signed, and was, at the absolute worst, several months away from being able to enrich weapons-grade plutonium. The Center for Arms Control said last year that Iran’s timeframe for the ability to obtain the components necessary for a nuclear weapon had moved from more than a year to around 3-4 months.
The cause of that decrease was Trump. Back during his disastrous first administration, he backed the U.S. out of the agreement negotiated by former President Barack Obama and several other nations. That deal, which offered Iran an easing of economic and peaceful nuclear (energy) sanctions in exchange for giving up on building a nuclear weapon, virtually guaranteed that Iran couldn’t come close to building a bomb within the next decade. Most estimates by third parties said it would take Iran up to five years to build a deliverable nuclear weapon from the point it backed out of the deal.
That’s because of the terms of that deal. It forced Iran to give up its enriched uranium – which it sent to France and received energy-specific uranium in return – and allowed for strict inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Iran abided by its end of the deal, giving up the uranium and allowing inspectors into its facilities. The IAEA and the United Nations Security Council (the U.S., China, Russia, France and the United Kingdom) were all satisfied that the deal had been honored.
Israel was not.
With little evidence, Netanyahu continued to insist that Iran had violated the agreement, that the U.S. had been duped, that Iran was days away from developing a nuclear weapon and that something must be done.
That’s when Trump came along. He blew up the whole thing, with the promise of negotiating a better deal. With promises that the U.S. would not be at war in the Middle East. With promises that Iran would not have nuclear weapons capabilities anytime soon.
But as it is with most things Trump, it was all utter BS.
Backing out of the deal moved us closer to war. It left Iran much closer to nuclear weapons capabilities than under the Obama deal – a deal that most experts and sane people agree likely would have meant Iran would never develop a nuclear weapon.
Ah, the good ol’ days of rational, sane thinking and drama-free foreign relations.
Now, following a bombing run that destroyed three facilities in Iran, the U.S. finds itself back in another Middle Eastern conflict. And somehow, we’re being led by a dumber group of people than the Bush administration team that took us into Iraq.
For a 90s kid, that seems utterly impossible – that we could elect a group dumber than the guys who tried that “weapons of mass destruction” spiel. Remember Colin Powell and his baggie of white powder? The yellow cake from Africa? The aluminum tubes?
Dumb as it all was, I bet those guys could figure out how to properly host a group chat.
When is enough going to be enough for y’all?
This is like the 50th thing that Trump has either lied about or has failed to accomplish over the last six months. He wasn’t going to pardon violent offenders from Jan. 6, and then he did. He wasn’t going to target working families for deportation, and then that’s pretty much all he’s done. He wasn’t going to acquiesce to Vladimir Putin and Russia and would stop the Ukraine-Russian war on day one, and then he folded like a cheap suit and war rages on.
Toss that into the same soup with the economic upheaval brought by his chaotic tariff implementation and the antagonizing of our allies and the blatant racism that seems to occur daily, and the first six months has been utterly awful. I hate to even open a news alert anymore, because I know it’s just going to be something depressing or maddening or unbelievably stupid. I know I’m not alone in those feelings.
And now, we’re somehow in another Middle Eastern war. Over something that doesn’t serve our interests at all. Over something that had been solved diplomatically prior to this doofus rolling in.
Yet, despite it all, some people are still defending him, still making excuses. Out here trying to explain why he had no choice but to bomb Iran, when the fact is he had every other choice. Just a couple of months ago, his Director of National Intelligence told Congress that Iran wasn’t close to obtaining a nuclear weapon.
But here we are. Staring at more economic uncertainty. Staring at more chaos. Less safe and mostly isolated.
When do we get great, again?
