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Friday, June 14, 2019

The Useful Idiots

In the 1920s, Lenin, the leader of the Soviet Union had a term for the many far left Western apologists for his regime.  He called these people (mostly journalists who wrote stories praising the USSR) "useful idiots".  In other words, these fools didn't know what they were talking about, but they were very useful to the propaganda operations of the Soviet state.

Useful Idiot is the perfect term to describe the reaction of much of the left to yesterday's attack on two oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman near Iran.  This response took two forms:

1.  The first whopper is that the story was a lie.  It was created by the Trump administration to justify going to war against Iran.  For a while yesterday, "gulf of Tonkin" was even trending on Twitter as far left useful idiots compared the Iranian attack (which they said was a lie) to the North Vietnamese attack on the American destroyer Turner Joy in 1964 which was used as a basis for the first air strikes on the North Vietnamese (and which they also said was a lie.)  Variants of this idiotic story were that Mike Pompeo and John Bolton had created the attack without telling President Trump in order to fool him into going to war against Iran.  It's the kind of conspiracy theory that no one should give any attention, but it got major play yesterday.

2.  The second story is that the attacks only happened because the USA has put sanctions on Iran.  This one is at least closer to the truth.  Sure, the Iranians lashed out at Western interests yesterday with these attacks.  If President Trump hadn't withdrawn the USA from the flawed JCPOA signed by Obama the Iranians wouldn't have attacked.  After all, that agreement guaranteed them nuclear weapons in just another 5 years.  Iran would gladly wait five years for nukes particularly as it got more cash from America.  Instead, Trump said "no nukes" and he put pressure on the Iranians to give up their nuclear weapons program.  Iranian nuclear weapons would be the end of the world as we know it.  Those weapons in the hands of a regime that believes global destruction will be followed by paradise are nuclear weapons that will be used.  We have never had nukes in the hands of a suicidal regime in the past.  We can't have them in such hands now.

The damage done by the useful idiots is that the Iranians read the media and watch social platforms just the same as we do.  The Ayatollah may believe that these useful idiots will apply enough pressure on President Trump to convince him to give in or at least go slow in responding to such attacks.  That would be misreading Trump, but it doesn't matter.  We don't want Iran to move towards war, but that is exactly what the useful idiots are pushing in their ignorance.

It's time for national unity in the face of the Iranian threat.  The media and the Democrats will never line up behind President Trump.  The American people, however, ought to do so.

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