RUTHFULLY YOURS

Tucker Carlson, the TV personality who currently enjoys an enormous gap between the size of his audience and his intellectual abilities, has decided to declare war on the Trump administration for the sin of taking Iran’s nuclear ambitions seriously.

President Donald Trump hit back with a post on Truth Social saying “Somebody please explain to kooky Tucker Carlson that, ‘IRAN CAN NOT HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON!”

Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor-Greene jumped in with Carlson saying, “Anyone slobbering for the U.S. to become fully involved in the Israel/Iran war is not America First/MAGA.”

The mainstream media is loving all this because they delight in anything that undermines Trump. But from our perspective, Carlson hasn’t come close to making his case.

Carlson seems to think, without much evidence, that this is a repeat of the Iraq fiasco, wherein the U.S. justified war based on a false belief that Saddam Hussein had a vast arsenal of weapons of mass destruction.

At the time, there was good reason to believe Hussein did, if only because he was so defiant about allowing international inspectors, per the ceasefire agreement he signed at the end of the Gulf War, to verify that he wasn’t building or storing WMDs.

It was only after U.S. troops toppled Hussein’s regime that it became clear that he was engaged in theatrics in an apparent attempt to raise his stature in the region by making the world think he had WMDs.

So, is that what Iran is doing? And are we falling for the same ruse again?

Carlson and Co. clearly believe so.

“I feel like I’ve been hearing that Iran is weeks away from a nuclear weapon for at least 25 years,” he said on his show recently. That episode featured “world-renowned economist” Jeffrey Sachs (who endorsed Jill Stein for president) saying, as Carlson nodded, that:

“Iran does not want a nuclear weapon, Iran’s neighbors like the Saudis and others in the Gulf do not want Iran to have a nuclear weapon. Iran’s major ally, Russia, does not want Iran to have a nuclear weapon, and Iran doesn’t want a nuclear weapon.

“But,” he went on, “Iran does not want to be, uh, defeated militarily by Israel, does not want to be bombed to hell by Israel, and does not want to be sanctioned to death economically by the United States.”

We’re not sure how being a “world-renowned economist” gives Sachs authority to talk about the Middle East or national security issues. And we are quite certain that Tucker Carlson does not have access to the same facts that Trump and his team do.

But that doesn’t seem to matter. To Carlson and Co., this is all just a smokescreen by Israel and warmongering neocons to justify regime change in Iran.

We’re no fans of Carlson, as readers may have noticed, and yet we are willing to concede that concerns about the U.S. getting entangled in another long, drawn-out war in the Middle East on false pretenses shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand.

But Iran is not Iraq. And Trump is no George Bush, suffering delusions that he can turn Iran into a model of democracy that will spread across the region. Trump isn’t deploying troops to the region. He isn’t using a terrorist attack on the U.S. to justify an unprovoked invasion of an unrelated country. All he’s done so far is warn Iran of consequences.

What’s more, everyone (that is, every reasonable person) agrees that a mullah-run Iran with a nuclear weapon is intolerable.

Which makes Carlson’s unshakable belief that Iran doesn’t want to develop nukes difficult to swallow.

Iran’s leaders can’t be unaware of what happened to Hussein when he kept pretending to have WMDs. And if Iran’s leaders truly do want peace with Israel and an end to U.S. sanctions – as Sachs says – there is an easy solution. Stop calling for Israel’s destruction and supporting groups trying to carry that out. And let international inspectors verify that Iran is not making weapons-grade uranium. Trump offered Iran a deal like that, and they walked away.

To the contrary, the fact that Iran isn’t trying to make a deal suggests that it hopes to keep everyone at bay until it does manage to build a bomb, at which point everything changes.

Winston Churchill once wrote that “It is a joke in Britain to say that the War Office is always preparing for the last war.” Carlson and like thinkers seem to be making the same mistake. Except in this case, they’re fighting against the last war.