I watched the beginning of Tucker’s interview with Joe Kent, and I bemoan Trump’s clinical incapacity to hire intelligent people.
Before Democrat readers perk up, please remember that Biden hired a crossdresser who stole luggage for the nuclear waste office, so let’s not get too smug on either side.
Kent said something along the lines of “even if Israel attacked Iran, we could have back channeled it to the Iranians that, hey, it wasn’t us.” He had time to think about it, although I’m sure that he’s not very familiar with the concept of thinking, and he came up with this kindergarten level lisping childishness? “It wasn’t me who did it, Mommy, it was Johnny.” Iran has bombed UAE and Bahrain who clearly “didn’t do it.” So what? How did it help them to not get bombed?
Two administrations, and he keeps hiring these absolute meatheads. Then he has to fire them and they pout up a storm.
Clarissa's Blog 
People have been twisting themselves in knots about Iran and nukes for many years. Netanyahu has been saying that Iran is on the verge of developing a nuke for decades. And if you’re a Trump loyalist (as Joe Kent still is), you have to insist both that the Iranian nuke program was obliterated in last year’s 12-day war, and that Iran had become an imminent threat a year later (Kent’s heresy consists of affirming the former but denying the latter).
I would have to listen to the interview with Tucker again, but Kent said a few things that do make sense. First, that Iran had a policy of being within reach of making a nuclear weapon, without actually making one. Second, that Iran was very careful about escalation. There is a cold-war word, brinksmanship, referring to the art of going close to e.g. starting a war without actually doing it. I do think this has been part of Iran’s nuclear policy. Under the nonproliferation treaty, signatory countries (apart from the Security Council big five) are not allowed nuclear weapons, but they are allowed civilian nuclear programs under the auspices of the international inspectors (IAEA). Iran kept pressing the boundaries of what was allowed or what would be tolerated by America, and apart from giving them proximity to weapons-making capability, these excesses also gave them something to trade away, in return for economic sanctions relief.
Given Iran’s political system, if Iran ever decided to openly declare itself a nuclear weapons state, as North Korea did around 2006 (dropping out of the nonproliferation treaty and conducting a nuclear test), there would have to be some kind of fatwa on the subject, stating when nukes and their use are legitimate. In this sense, Khamenei’s fatwa to the contrary had a symbolic significance, determining at the very least what everyone in the regime should say to the world. Incidentally, fatwas can be disputed, and within the last decade there was the occasional mullah in the holy city Qom who suggested that the time might be coming to change policy (and I think whoever rules Iran after the mullahs will eventually be under pressure to develop nukes, simply because of the country’s strategic environment).
OK, so that’s my attempt to unravel some of what has been going on around Iran’s nuclear program. As I said, it is a situation that has been riddled with contradictions for decades, and that’s why I wouldn’t consider Kent a “meathead” simply because he repeats some of the policy cliches. I doubt that he’s an original thinker on the topic, I would expect that his beliefs are a mix of intelligence-community dogma and Trumpist dogma. As a participant in the game of nukes (by virtue of being in the administration), it’s almost inevitable that he is going to espouse some version of the policy doubletalk that papers over the situation in which Iran has been playing will-they won’t-they for decades, untouchable closest ally Israel has been wanting America to attack Iran for decades, and (thanks to Iran’s geographic, technological, and demographic strengths) America could never completely end the situation without going to war and changing the regime.
Obviously American presidents have preferred policy doubletalk and brittle compromises like Obama’s nuclear deal, to actually going to war. In this sense, I think Kent must be right in his chief claim, that Trump went to war because the advocates of the Israeli policy of war, finally overcame the advocates of America’s institutional meta-policy of avoiding war with Iran.
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