The Ridiculous Distortions of the Iran Obsession

 

Daniel Larison 

Posted onOctober 11, 2020

From The American Conservative:

Mike Pompeo gave an interview with Newsmax TV this week, and during that interview he made one of the most ridiculous statements he has uttered during his short, embarrassing tenure as Secretary of State:

The most important thing that President Trump did was recognize that the nuclear deal was dumb, that it was bad for America, that it presented real risk. And so he ripped America out of that back in May of 2018. Since then, we have taken a fundamentally different approach to stability in the Middle East. We recognize the Islamic Republic of Iran as the greatest threat to that peace – the greatest threat, frankly, to Americans all across this great country [bold mine-DL]. And so we have put enormous costs on the regime itself.

Pompeo knows as well as anyone that Iran poses no real threat to Americans in the U.S., so it is risible and dishonest for him to assert that Iran is somehow the “greatest threat” to Americans here.

Iran does not have the ability to attack the US, and it likely never will have that ability, but the more important point here is that the deranged exaggeration of the threat from Iran comes at the expense of neglecting other much more obvious and immediate threats to this country. While Pompeo has been traversing the globe to cajole other governments into normalizing relations with Israel and berating our allies for refusing to dynamite the JCPOA at the U.N., Americans continue to die from a pandemic that this administration has done very little to get under control. Our political leaders obsess over minor foreign threats that can do us no harm while neglecting the real dangers that claim American lives on a daily basis. As the pandemic continues to spread in this country and the death toll rises over 210,000, our government’s priority remains piling sanctions on a medium-sized country on the other side of the planet in the vain hope of collapsing their state. Instead of focusing on international cooperation to protect Americans from this scourge, our top officials are fixated on vilifying a country that can’t do anything to us. You could hardly ask for a foreign policy more divorced from the real, vital interests of the United States than this one.

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