Last week, during his State of the Union address on Tuesday and again on Friday, just before launching Operation Epic Fury, Donald Trump laid out his case for attacking Iran.
The U.S. president offered a lengthy bill of indictment against Iran’s Islamic Republic, stretching back to the 1979 revolution: the takeover of the American embassy in Tehran, support for terrorism, brutality towards its citizenry, and support for proxies that have killed Americans.
Above all, Trump stressed the peril the U.S. and its allies would face were Iran to build nuclear bombs. Despite the absence of confirming intelligence, he claimed that it would soon possess a missile that could reach the American homeland.
Despite this litany of complaints and his characterization of Iran’s government as “evil”, Trump sent his envoys to Geneva to negotiate with Tehran about its nuclear program. After three rounds, Trump tired of diplomacy and blamed the Iranians for refusing to say the magic words: Iran will not become a nuclear weapons state. In fact, senior Iranian officials have done so time and again. “Iran will under no circumstances ever develop nuclear weapons,” Iranian foreign minister Abbas Araghchi tweeted on 24 February.
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