This is a sobering moment.  And where you come down on what happened yesterday, and over the last week in Iran, depends on how willing you are to suspend your disbelief and accept the narrative fed to you by the administration in Washington DC.  One only has to look to recent history.  A regime in the middle east was on the verge of acquiring weapons of mass destruction.  An American president said ‘no.’  And after “shock and awe,” what happened?  There were no weapons of mass destruction.

Fast forward to 2025, and to hear them tell it, Iran was one Amazon Prime delivery away from raining down nuclear bombs from the sky.

Who are we to believe?  A president with a well-documented penchant (and predisposition) for lying – The Washington Post catalogued 30,573 false or misleading claims over the course of his first presidential term, an average of 21 per day.  Or should we believe that president’s own intelligence chief, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who testified three months ago that the US intelligence community “continues to assess Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorized a nuclear weapons program that he suspended in 2003.”  Or should we believe Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu who has exaggerated the immediacy of the Iranian nuclear threat like the boy who cried wolf going back 30 years, always claiming to know what UN nuclear inspectors along with US and European intelligence agencies did not – namely, that Iran was on the verge of deploying a ready-to-use nuclear weapon aimed at Israel.

Netanyahu’s alarmist claim has never been proven, and is in fact contradicted by Iran’s theocratic supreme leader himself, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who issued a “fatwa” (Islamic religious decree) banning all weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear weapons.  Moreover, it is Netanyahu’s Israel that actually possesses nuclear weapons, refuses to sign the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, and refuses to allow International Atomic Energy Agency inspections.

Then there’s the G7, meeting in Canada.  They issued a statement:  “Israel has a right to defend itself.”  Israel launched an unprovoked attack on Iran, justifying its actions by claiming that Tehran may acquire a nuclear weapon.  This is a problem.  “May acquire” literally means “does not at present have,” and this renders Israel’s attack illegal:  the United Nations charter forbids wars justified by the claim of a future threat.

The G7 leaders go on to state “Iran is the principal source of regional instability and terror.”   Israel’s leader, Mr. Netanyahu, is subject to an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court, accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity, the first time that the leader of a democracy and western-aligned state has been charged by the court in its 22-year history.  Israel has erased Gaza from the face of the planet in a genocidal bloodbath.  Israel has attacked southern Lebanon and Beirut.  Israel has invaded and occupied Syria.  But in spite of all that manifest and incontrovertible evidence, they want us to look the other way and believe it is Iran creating instability and fomenting terror in the region, when the reality on the ground clearly shows that no country in the middle east is a greater source of regional instability and terror than Israel.

Willful blindness in the face of bravado is nothing new.  It led us into Iraq.  And it came from the same source, Benjamin Netanyahu, who told the United States congress in 2002. “If you take out Saddam, Saddam’s regime, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region.”  I missed the positive reverberations – in fact, George and Dick’s Iraqi Adventure had nothing but negative ones, for the US and for the region.

So, once again, we have engaged the middle east on the back of a lie and faulty intelligence purposefully distorted for political reasons.  Our overall objective is difficult if not impossible to define:  it’s like we’re saying ‘stop doing what you’re not doing or we’ll spank you again.’  There appears to be no real end game and no plan for what happens next – Iran will almost certainly retaliate, and then what?  Trump demanding that Iran capitulate or face further attacks is not a policy worthy of a great nation like the United States, it is the tactic of a bully who pokes you in the eye and dares you to come back for more.

And if you’ve got whiplash from Trump’s about face, you’re not alone.  He campaigned as an isolationist.  In his 2nd inaugural address he said:

We will measure our success not only by the battles we win but also by the wars that we end — and perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into.

He followed that with this line:  “My proudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker and unifier.  That’s what I want to be:  a peacemaker and a unifier.”  In the five months since he uttered those words he has threatened military action against Panama, against Canada, and against Denmark in order to seize Greenland, he has bombed Yemen, he has wrested control of the California National Guard from its rightful commander-in-chief, the state’s governor, he has agreed on camera with an official from his administration who suggested that governor, Gavin Newsom, should be arrested for opposing this provocative and autocratic power grab, and if all that weren’t enough, he’s deployed US Marines on American soil in Los Angeles. Against American citizens.

“That’s what I want to be:  a peacemaker and a unifier.”  Let’s all just sit back for a moment and let the peace and the unity wash over us.