The New Yorker:

It’s not easy to trust the President to make an optimal decision. For one thing, he is suspicious of nearly every source of information save his own instincts.

By David Remnick

“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.” Whether or not Mark Twain ever really said that line, it fits and resonates loudly as President Trump shuttles between the Oval Office and the Situation Room, weighing if he should dispatch bombers on yet another American sortie to the Middle East.

First, the necessary caveats. Since seizing power, in 1979, Iran’s theocracy has menaced its more than ninety million citizens and the wider region. The ayatollahs have deprived the country of a prosperous civil society, channelling resources instead into militarism and messianic fantasy. The regime relies on repression—crackdowns, imprisonment, torture, executions—to maintain control of a stifled and restive population. Many among the country’s educated élite have emigrated. The ranks of the leadership are staffed, in large measure, with satraps and mediocrities. Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons in tandem with its nuclear-energy project has proved a pointless catastrophe—most of all for the Iranians themselves. As Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, notes, the nuclear program has been a practical and a strategic “albatross”; it supplies only about one per cent of Iran’s energy needs but has cost up to five hundred billion dollars in construction, research, and the penalties of international sanctions.

Meanwhile, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei—the Supreme Leader since 1989 and now eighty-six years old—pursues his regime’s martial goals and ominous fantasies. In 2015, he vowed that Israel, which shares no border with Iran, would disappear by 2040. The regime has projected force through the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and has bankrolled proxy militias throughout the region: Hezbollah, in Lebanon; Hamas, in Gaza; the Houthis, in Yemen; and, in Iraq, the Islamic Resistance. Armed and advised by Tehran, these groups have all carried out lethal operations.

For decades, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has called the Iranian nuclear enterprise intolerable, both for Israel and for the world. In many ways, Netanyahu is a flagrantly duplicitous politician; there is little he won’t say or do to maintain his coalition and his power. But he is right in this: a nuclear-armed Iran would threaten Israel (which has had nuclear weapons for decades) and could provoke Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt, and others to pursue such a weapon, too.

Go to link