Friends + Interlocutors,

Since President Trump’s State of the Union address was going to be entirely predictable and repetitious, I did not watch it. I already have a heartburn problem. I worked to clean out one of my closets.

The enclosed gloomy commentary by Daniel Larison is, regrettably, almost entirely correct. However, I would not call Trump a liar, like Larison does, so much as a fantasizer. In any case, he is doing little more than repeating what venal, bipartisan Washington politicians have been saying about Iran for two or three decades. I would call those politicians more outright liars than Trump is. Trump just can’t help himself.

However, it is true that he has done more than repeat nonsense when it comes to Iran. For no rational reason, in his first term Trump tore up the nuclear agreement which the Obama administration had negotiated with Iran. That agreement solved the purported but non-existant problem of Iran’s nuclear weapons. The downside for Israel was that this agreement immediately opened up Iran to outside investment and trade. 

Iran was going to be treated like any other country. The Europeans were breaking down the doors in Tehran to reinvest and normalize. Meanwhile, Tehran would be free to continue to tell the truth about Zionism and about Israel's cruxifixction of the Palestinians. No wonder Tel Aviv was having a panic attack. It demanded regime change from the White House, not agreements which kept the Iranian regime in place.

The important thing to bear in mind is that the whole Iran nuclear weapons issue is a hoax, an ongoing hoax to justify Washington’s abnormal and stupid foreign policy towards Iran which has been in place for decades. Meanwhile, Israel continues to maintain its formidable nuclear weapons arsenal and the world remains mum about it. That’s not normal either.

Patrick

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