Scott Horton

They have to resort to a crude analogy about football yard lines because they can't say the truth, which is that they had zero weapons-grade uranium.

They were not producing it.

They were trying to get the United States back in the deal that they are still officially within the JCPOA with the rest of the U.N.

Security Council, wherein they shipped all of their enriched uranium stockpile out of the country to France to be transferred to fuel rods.

Their insistence was on their continued ability to enrich uranium.

And so this goes to one of the things that he at least sort of brought up that deserves addressing.

When Trump came into power in 2017...

he decided on this Israeli-influenced maximum pressure campaign.

And he said the JCPOA was the worst deal in the history of any time any two men ever shook hands and all these kinds of things in his hyperbolic way, which, of course, made it very difficult for him to figure out a way to stay in the thing or to compromise along its lines.

But the fact of the matter is, if he had just played it straight and said, listen, Ayatollah,

We don't have to be friends, but we do have a deal here, which my predecessor struck with you.

But I don't like these sunset provisions.

And I want to send my guys over there and see if we can figure out a way to convince you that we really wish you'd shut down calm altogether or this or that or the other thing and try to approach them in good faith.

We talk about yard lines and things.

We had a JCPOA.

OK, so toward peace, we were past the 50 yard line.

Donald Trump could have gone to Tehran and shook hands with the Ayatollah as Dick Cheney complained that we had cold relations with Iran back in 1998 when he was the head of Halliburton.

And so we can do business with these guys.

Donald Trump could have gone right over there and done business.

And instead, he gave in to Netanyahu's lies.