On Thursday, President Trump said he’d be “honored” to meet with Iran’s new “supreme leader” Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei. Mr. Trump said further, “If we make a deal, it’s possible that I would meet. I’d be okay with that.”
Let’s parse that out a bit to ensure we’re on the same page.
First, it would be an honor for Mr. Khamenei, not for Mr. Trump. How can the leader of the world’s leading terrorist-sponsoring nation sit side-by-side with the leader of the free world and the strongest fighter against terrorism except perhaps for Israel? He can’t, unless the president is thoughtless about sharing the legitimacy of the United States with Iran. Iran is a rogue regime, the world’s chief sponsor of terrorism and the one nation that can be counted on for Islamic extremism. In no way can it be equated with the United States.
For Mr. Trump to pay the ayatollahs one thin dime would be a disgrace to the nation.
Nothing much has changed since last week. The Strait of Hormuz is still closed. The “negotiations” between Iran and the U.S. are still hung up over the “red lines” that neither wants to cross: the Iranian nuclear program, the closure of the Strait, and the lifting of all sanctions on Iran. Mr. Trump’s red lines are surrender of the enriched uranium, the complete end to Iran’s nuclear weapons ambitions, and reopening of the Strait to all shipping.
You see what I mean by the impossibility of negotiations with Iran? It’s not that the U.S. negotiators have a tough job: they have an impossible one.
Well, actually, there was a small change in Iran’s position last week. The ayatollahs want $12 billion in front money, just for agreeing to negotiate and another $24 billion in the course of the 60-day negotiations that would supposedly begin at that point.
Which is totally ridiculous. If Mr. Trump were to pay anything to Iran — within the negotiations or not — he’d be castigated by pretty much everyone, this author included. And it’s not just because Mr. Trump said that the Obama deal — which initially transferred about $1.7 billion in cash to the ayatollahs — was the worst deal possible.
For Mr. Trump to pay the ayatollahs one thin dime would be a disgrace to the nation. We owe the Iranians precisely nothing for waging war against us since 1979, lying about their nuclear program, and generally sponsoring terrorism around the world for their 47 year reign.
The Iranian demand for money is the sort of delusional thinking we have come to expect from Tehran. They never believe they have lost (or are losing) a war. Typical was the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war in which both sides suffered great losses. Nevertheless, with a UN-brokered ceasefire in effect, neither side conceded defeat and the war really never ended.
Back to the war we are in now. We’ve seen how impossible our negotiators’ task really is. Adding a demand for money to it would be unthinkable. Unless the sort of twisted thinking we are used to from Tehran came into play.
The Iranians claim — despite the devastation faced by their military — to be winning the war. Their high-flying claims of success — they even want the Israelis to stop killing Hizballah in Lebanon — are unmatched by reality. And reality never interferes with the ayatollahs’ thinking.
We’ve seen this all before. In the Soviet era, when any revolt or anything like it occurred, the Soviets would deny it was even happening. When, the revolt against the USSR in Hungary in 1956, it got so big it couldn’t be denied, the Soviets tried to explain it away.
We saw the same in Hitler’s Germany, though news was harder to come by in the closed doors of those days. When the news finally came out it was too brutal for people to understand at first. Many are still trying to deny it.
The Iranians don’t say what they say just for local consumption. They understand that their lies are picked up and broadcast as truth by many in the Western media. As Mao Tse-tung said, a lie told one-hundred times becomes the truth.
There’s not more that can be said of the Iranian demand for money. Mr. Trump won’t fall for it and we hope he can be relied on to squelch the ayatollahs’ other demands.
If there is to be an end to this war, it must be on our terms not on the Iranians’.
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