President Donald Trump’s ongoing war with Iran and the resulting disruption of world oil supplies are entirely problems of Trump’s own making. He attacked Iran six months ago in the absence of any credible threat to the U.S. or its allies. Now Trump insists that continued hostilities are justified to thwart Iran’s efforts to develop a nuclear weapon.
But we must not forget that in 2015, President Barack Obama, joined by China, Russia, France, Germany, the U.K., and the European Union, negotiated an agreement with Iran (JCPOA) that completely froze that country’s nuclear weapons program, in return for lifting economic sanctions against it. International weapons inspectors on the ground confirmed that Iran’s work on the program entirely stopped.
In 2018, however, President Trump withdrew from the agreement, calling it “the worst deal ever negotiated.” Predictably, Iran soon resumed its enrichment of uranium bomb fuel.
In other words, Trump is now spending billions of taxpayer dollars, sacrificing American troops, depleting U.S. weapons stocks, and threatening the world economy by waging war to abate an Iranian nuclear weapons program that he alone permitted to go forward.
No amount of lying, exaggeration, and distraction can obscure the fact that Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress have led us into this quagmire. Who will now get us out?