Nobody is pulling the wool over President Trump’s eyes

To paraphrase Shakespeare, “will he or won’t he, that is the question.” Will President Trump order the U.S. military to attack Iran? All over the United States; indeed all over the world, everyone is watching the deployment of US carrier strike groups, and trying to deduce President Trump’s intentions by analyzing every off-the-cuff comment. Some of the headlines generated by journalists who treat Trump’s spontaneous quips as if they were official pronouncements, border on the absurd. If during some on the tarmac banter, President Trump retorts that a deal should be reached “I guess over the next month, something like that”, the headlines screech that Trump has given 30 days deadline to the Iranian regime. What a load of hooey. Those who engage in this type analysis may have been watching President Trump, but they haven’t been observing him. In his second term Trump is nobody’s fool.

President Trump knows that no agreement can be made with the regime that currently holds Iran in the grip of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamanei. The Iranian regime is made up of clerics who are hard core Islamic Shite “Twelvers”. To understand the regime that control Iran, you have to understand Twelver Shia Islam. The core belief of Twelvers is that after the death of the Prophet Muhammad the only legitimate leader of the Muslims (the “Ummah”) was a decedent of the Prophet. Between 661 CE and 874 CE, the first eleven (11) Imams contended for leadership of the Muslim Ummah, with each meeting with an unnatural death. The 12th Imam Muhammad ibn al-Hasan al-Askari a/k/a Muhammad al-Mahdi (the Mahdi), lived in his father’s house in Samarra, Iraq. In 874 CE, after the death by poison of the 11th Imam from, the 12th Imam went into hiding in the cellar of his father’s home, not wanting to share his predecessor’s fate. Without getting into the details of Shia theology of minor and major occultations, suffice it to say that when the soldiers of the Abbasid Caliph raided the house where the 12th Imam was hiding the 12th Imam was never heard........

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