“To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war,” Winston Churchill reportedly said.
We will soon know if Iran agrees.
The talks scheduled for Saturday between Iran and the United States are shaping up as a crucial test of the mad mullahs’ intentions. If they are hell-bent on building nuclear weapons, war is inevitable.
It would be war with Israel and probably with America, too. For Iran, that means taking on the Little Satan and the Great Satan simultaneously.
That’s what the crazy mullahs always said they wanted. If it hasn’t occurred to them yet, soon they will realize what a colossal mistake they have made.
“If they don’t make a deal, there will be bombing,” President Trump said recently. “It will be bombing the likes of which they have never seen before.”
Nothing subtle about that!
A deal or destruction
The president, who revealed the planned weekend talks while meeting Monday in the Oval Office with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, said, “I think everybody agrees that doing a deal would be preferable to doing the obvious.
“The obvious is not something that I want to be involved with, or frankly that Israel wants to be involved with if they can avoid it,” he said. “So we’ll see if we can avoid it . . . It’s getting to be very dangerous territory.”
The talks, to be held in Oman, will be direct negotiations, the president said, but Iran later said the talks would be “indirect,” meaning with a mediator.
Either way, Trump’s bottom line is the absolute right one: Iran must dismantle its nuclear program and not just pretend to abide by restrictions and inspections aimed at preventing it from building a nuclear weapon.
Those were the major terms of the 2015 deal Barack Obama and Europe crafted, and Trump wisely canceled it during his first White House tenure because it lacked solid verification procedures and penalties.
Because Iran was cheating on nearly every aspect of the deal and playing hide and seek with inspectors, there was no way to know with confidence what it was really doing.
Almost as bad, Iran was using billions of dollars Obama had unfrozen to fund its nuclear program and its terror proxies. Talk about a lose-lose. Naturally, Joe Biden foolishly aimed to reverse Trump’s reversal by trying to coax Iran back into another soft deal and even withdrew or stopped enforcing oil and banking sanctions to sweeten the offer.
He also paid a reported $6 billion for the return of five American hostages.
In return he got bupkis, demonstrating his fecklessness on the global stage. Thanks largely to his chaotic and deadly withdrawal from Afghanistan, our adversaries didn’t fear him, Iran included.
Military options
Israel, of course, suffered the horrible Hamas invasion on Biden’s watch, yet Biden was tougher on Israel than he was on Iran, even though it funded and trained Hamas. Thankfully, Trump’s election ended the downward cycle and amounts to an earthquake in the Mideast.
American leadership is back. And it has a chip on its shoulder.
Federal prosecutors charged last year that Iran hatched a plot and hired an assassin to kill Trump.
As a result, in February, the president told reporters, “I’ve left instructions if they do it, they get obliterated. There won’t be anything left.”
He said that as he signed an executive order directing the government to impose “maximum pressure” on Iran, including in the enforcement of sanctions.
Trump also inherited a big, new advantage: Israel has redrawn the region’s military map.
Its continual smashing of Gaza has effectively taken Hamas off the board as a major threat, and Israel has also reduced Hezbollah to a shadow of itself.
What started with the astonishing operation that made Hezbollah pagers go boom-boom eventually saw most of the terror group’s enormous base in Lebanon turned into rubble.
Iran also lost an ally and bases with the downfall of the murderous Assad regime in Syria. Its former top general there recently gave a speech in a Tehran mosque in which he was recorded as saying, “I don’t consider losing Syria something to be proud of. We were defeated, and defeated very badly, we took a very big blow and it’s been very difficult,” according to a translation published by The New York Times.
Meanwhile, Trump is pounding the Houthis, another Iranian terror proxy, with massive bombing attacks in Yemen.
Fox News reports that six B-2 stealth bombers deployed to a base in the Indian Ocean have been hitting Houthi targets with bunker-buster bombs, which are our largest non-nuclear bombs and are designed for underground targets such as munitions storage.
The base is within striking distance of Iran, which has hidden some of its key nuclear facilities deep into the sides of mountains. Any attack on those sites would likely need to use the bunker-busters and the B-2 bombers to be effective.
Israel doesn’t have those massive 30,000-pound bombs or any aircraft capable of carrying and delivering them.
Air defenses weak
Another major change is that Iran’s military has been severely degraded, with Israel destroying most of its air-defense capability. After Israel carried out the daring assassinations of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran and Hezbollah boss Hassan Nasrallah in Beirut, the mullahs made a show of retaliating but pulled back from a direct confrontation, knowing their regime was outgunned and vulnerable.
Despite Trump’s long relationship with Netanyahu, the Israeli leader was reportedly surprised by the president’s announcement of the weekend talks during their meeting.
Publicly, Netanyahu said only that “We’re both united in the goal that Iran does not get nuclear weapons. If it can be done diplomatically, in a full way, the way it was done in Libya, I think that would be a good thing, but it has to be stopped one way or another.”
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, in confirming the Oman meeting, said,“The ball is in America’s court.”
His government has always denied it is seeking a nuclear weapon, but is believed to have raised its enrichment of uranium to 60% purity, which has no application beyond nuclear weapons.
So its claims that the uranium is only for civilian use are not persuasive. All the more so because it has rejected efforts of international inspectors to visit its nuclear facilities.
Trump, when asked Monday if he’s serious about the US taking military action to destroy Iran’s nuclear program if the talks fail, underscored his determination to get the right result and the consequences if the mullahs refuse to see the light.
“Iran will be in great danger . . . I hate to say it. Great danger.”
“It’s not a complicated formula,” he added. “Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon. If the talks aren’t successful, it’ll be a very bad day for Iran.”
That’s a man with a plan.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
