Anna

Trump is reportedly contemplating using nuclear weapons against Iran's facilities. This is exactly and precisely where all those who advocated withdrawing from the JCPOA, and then "maximum pressure," wanted him to be. Trace the timeline. First, they claimed the JCPOA was a bad deal that needed fixing. Remember the Foundation for Defense of Democracies' motto, "fix it or nix it"? Then they lured him out of the agreement by insisting it could not be fixed. Then they lobbied for the most extreme economic measures imaginable under maximum pressure. Then the narrative quietly shifted: economic pressure alone would not work, they said, and diplomacy with Iran required a "credible threat of military force." Just short of calling for war. Once the use of force was normalized, they set about getting him to actually use it. Report after report argued that designating Iran's official armed forces, the IRGC, as a terrorist organization, and then assassinating Iran's top general, would make Tehran cave. It didn't. But the ice had been broken. From then on, every step was an escalation, and every diplomatic initiative that might have eased tensions or produced a peaceful settlement was attacked and buried. Then came the strike on Fordow, alongside Israel. Then the war in February, in which they got him to cross every red line and pushed a settlement further out of reach than ever. Running in parallel all these years was a campaign to persuade Washington that diplomacy with Iran is a waste of time and that the only option worth keeping on the table is the military one. Iran is just "buying time," they said. Iran never honors its commitments, they said, even as IAEA inspectors verified its compliance over and over. You can't negotiate with the world's leading state sponsor of terrorism. Iran cannot be trusted. Iran is weak. Why bother negotiate with a “significantly weakened Iran” when you can simply use force to extract concessions? So much for "weak"! Every one of these assumptions has proved false. Yet instead of asking why they were wrong at every turn, they read each failure as proof that the last measure was too mild. And so here we are. Openly discussing war crimes, threatening to wipe out power plants and bridges, bombing civilian infrastructure and even weighing nuclear weapons have all become ordinary instruments of policy. They took a president who brandished "The Art of the Deal" and sold himself as the ultimate dealmaker, and turned him into a man deciding whether to become the first leader since Truman to use a nuclear weapon. Against whom? A country that was already at the negotiating table, prepared to reach an equitable agreement. So don't let them ever claim this was about a bad nuclear deal that needed correcting. It was always about Israel's destructive agenda, carried into Washington by its lobbies, its mouthpieces and its PR firms. There is an old fable about a frog dropped into a pot of water that is heated so slowly it never thinks to jump. Each degree feels bearable, because it is only one degree warmer than the last. The frog never notices the moment the water starts to boil. Washington is that frog. And the water is already boiling.