by Michael Snyder, End Of The American Dream:

Negotiations with Iran are over before they could even take place.  After President Trump and Iranian leadership exchanged more insults on Tuesday, the Iranians declared that the “channel of diplomacy” is now closed “forever”.  Of course anything is possible in the future, but for now it appears that any possibility of a diplomatic solution is completely dead, and the clock is ticking because two exceedingly important deadlines are coming up within the next two weeks.  President Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have both made it incredibly clear that they do not want Iran to possess nuclear weapons, and Iran’s nuclear program is about to pass a critical threshold.  Diplomatic negotiations were the only alternative to military action, and now it seems that military action is the only option left on the table.  That means that we could literally be counting down the days before missiles start flying back and forth, and it will be a war that is far more terrible than we are being told by the mainstream media.

The Trump administration seems to believe that the new economic sanctions that they just hit Iran with will alter the situation, but the truth is that they aren’t going to really add much of anything to the economic sanctions that were previously imposed.

In response to these new sanctions, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani accused President Trump of suffering from “mental retardation”…

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani blasted the sanctions against Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, as “outrageous and idiotic,” noting the 80-year-old Shiite cleric has no plans to ever travel to the USA. In remarks broadcast on Iranian state television, Rouhani said the White House suffers from “mental retardation.”

Needless to say, President Trump was not amused by this.  He subsequently went on Twitter and threatened that any sort of attack “on anything American will be met with great and overwhelming force”…

….Iran’s very ignorant and insulting statement, put out today, only shows that they do not understand reality. Any attack by Iran on anything American will be met with great and overwhelming force. In some areas, overwhelming will mean obliteration. No more John Kerry & Obama!

That is quite a vague red line that President Trump has now established, and it means that it isn’t going to take very much at all to start a war between the United States and Iran.

When the press later asked Trump about a potential exit strategy if war with Iran does erupt, Trump responded by saying “I don’t need exit strategies”…

Trump returned to the subject of Iran during an event in the Oval Office on Tuesday, reiterating his commitment that his administration would not allow Tehran to obtain nuclear weapons. Asked whether he had an exit strategy should a conflict arise with Iran, the president responded, “I don’t need exit strategies.”

So what does that mean exactly?

Is he saying that an exit strategy wouldn’t be necessary because Iran would be bombed off the map?

When President Trump called off the airstrikes against Iran at the last minute and talked about the potential for negotiations, many were hopeful that a peaceful solution could be achieved.  But if you are seeking to negotiate with someone, it is probably not a good idea to slap the foreign minister from the other country with personal economic sanctions.  For the Iranians, this was apparently the final straw…

“You say you really want to hold talks with us but at the same time you’re saying that you want to boycott and sanction our foreign minister, so you’re lying,” Rouhani said.

Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Abbas Mousavi said on Twitter that the latest sanctions will result in “closing (the) channel of diplomacy forever,” according to Iranian state-run television Press TV.

Not that negotiations with the Iranians would have yielded anything anyway.  But we must find some way to avoid World War III, because a war with Iran would unleash global chaos that the United States is simply not prepared to handle.

Unfortunately, President Trump is currently surrounded by war hawks, and he appears to be completely convinced that he does not need congressional approvalbefore going to war with Iran…

During a portion of an interview with Hill.TV released on Monday, President Trump said he doesn’t need approval from Congress before launching strikes against Iran.

Trump said, “I like the idea of keeping Congress abreast, but I wouldn’t have to do that.”

Actually, the U.S. Constitution is very clear on the matter.

Just because the Constitution has been ignored by previous presidents does not mean that it is not binding.

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