THE FEAR THAT DROVE TRUMP TO WAR
The specter of a nuclear Iran, no matter how unreal, provided the rationale for the current slaughter
In the days when Air Force General Charles Brown Jr. served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—under President Joe Biden from 2023 until his firing by President Donald Trump early in 2025—there was highly secret contact between Brown, who is now at Duke University, and the military leadership of Iran. He even had some indirect dealings with the late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the recently assassinated supreme leader.
Out of those dealings, which were about an earlier air war between Iran and Israel during the last year of the Biden administration, there emerged the story of an inside joke about a golf match between the inscrutable Ayatollah and Saint Paul the Apostle. On the first hole, a long par four, so the joke went, Saint Paul hit a drive right down the middle of the fairway. The Ayatollah’s drive sliced into a dense bank of bushes, whereupon a rabbit picked it up and hopped it onto the fairway. Saint Paul then hit an iron shot to the green, twelve feet from the hole. The Ayatollah’s second shot landed in a sand bunker near the green. A bird quickly dug out the ball and dropped it into the cup for a birdie three. At that point Saint Paul said to the Ayatollah, “Are you going to keep on fucking around or play golf?”
