Michael Goodwin: Trumps given Iran a way out from impending warthey can do it the easy way or the hard way

“To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war,” Winston Churchill reportedly said. We will soon know if Iran agrees.The talks scheduled for Saturday between Iran and the United States are shaping up as a crucial test of the mad mullahs’ intentions.If they are hell-bent on building nuclear weapons, war is inevitable.It would be war with Israel and probably with America, too.

For Iran, that means taking on the Little Satan and the Great Satan simultaneously. That’s what the crazy mullahs always said they wanted.If it hasn’t occurred to them yet, soon they will realize what a colossal mistake they have made. “If they don’t make a deal, there will be bombing,” President Trump said recently.

“It will be bombing the likes of which they have never seen before.”Nothing subtle about that!The president, who revealed the planned weekend talks while meeting Monday in the Oval Office with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, said, “I think everybody agrees that doing a deal would be preferable to doing the obvious. “The obvious is not something that I want to be involved with, or frankly that Israel wants to be involved with if they can avoid it,” he said.“So we’ll see if we can avoid it .

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It’s getting to be very dangerous territory.”The talks, to be held in Oman, will be direct negotiations, the president said, but Iran later said the talks would be “indirect,” meaning with a mediator. Either way, Trump’s bottom line is the absolute right one: Iran must dismantle its nuclear program and not just pretend to abide by restrictions and inspections aimed at preventing it from building a nuclear weapon.Those were the major terms of the 2015 deal Barack Obama and Europe crafted, and Trump wisely canceled it during his first White House tenure because it lacked solid verification procedures and penalties. Because Iran was cheating on nearly every aspect of the deal and playing hide and seek with inspectors, there was no way to k...