OPINION:
The reverberations of President Donald Trump’s first address to the General Assembly are still sounding, and the latest from the naysaying side is this ridiculous suggestion — that his bold remarks on the Iran treaty have actually jumpstarted sympathy for the regime.
Yeah, right. To borrow from the Rolling Stones: Anyone who has sympathy for the devil is a devil him- or herself.
This, from The New York Times — apparently scratching and clawing to dreg all the dirt possible from Trump’s speech: “Critics Fear Trump’s Attacks on Iran Could Backfire.”
Do they, now?
“Trump’s bombastic attacks on Iran over the nuclear deal may have created an unanticipated outcome: sympathy for the Iranian government,” the story read.
And then the paper cites the chairman of the Eurasia Group, a political risk consultancy organization led by notable brainiacs.
“The bombast makes Trump look like a predator, circling,” said Cliff Kupchan in The New York Times. “That creates sympathy for Iran among the international community. It’s especially dangerous because Iran is very skilled at playing the victim, aggrieved by foreign powers for decades.”
Excuse the question — but dangerous for whom?
It’s not as if Iran and America had been besties — try as Barack Obama did to sell that notion, post-nuclear treaty — and Trump’s criticisms of the rogue nation were symbolic stabs to the back.
It’s not as if Trump didn’t tell the United Nations anything that was even less than the obvious.
He called Iran a “rogue nation” — which it is; the nuclear deal with Iran an “embarrassment” to the United States — which it is; and said it was “time for the entire world to join us in demanding that Iran’s government end its pursuit of death and destructions” — again, which sounds pretty good to the sane of mind.
Know who it doesn’t sound so great to? Iran.
Iran President Hassan Rouhani called Trump’s remarks “ignorant, absurd and hateful.” But so what?
Rouhani, remember, leads a nation that would like nothing more than to see America crumble and fall — and to take Israel with it as well. If Rouhani wants to roll over and play victim to the United States and pretend Trump’s rhetoric brought about those visions of destruction, well so be it.
The New York Times may press forward such notions. So, too, the anti-Trumpers on the left who would like nothing more than to see the previous administration’s “diplomacy at all costs” foreign policy continue, to infinity and beyond.
Just don’t ask America to buy into that nonsensical line of thought as well. Trump didn’t make an enemy of Iran. And those who want to act as if his words did are only siding with the enemy — protecting its evil, whether overtly or unwittingly. Having sympathy for the devil doesn’t make the devil good.
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