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President Trump issued his 8pm Tuesday ultimatum to Iran on Sunday to cut a deal with him and restore relative peace to the Middle East and fully reopen the Straits of Hormuz to shipping. The deadline was issued because Trump wanted progress in negotiations with Iran; if the 8pm deadline comes to pass with no deal in place, Trump says he will unleash force to destroy infrastructure within Iran. In a statement on his Truth Social page, Trump declared, “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.” 710 WOR’s Curtis Sliwa and Larry Mendt in the Morning program was on the air when the ultimatum was posted, prompting Cutis and Larry to address and debate the central point: could- indeed, should- we be blowing up stuff to send Iran “back to the Stone Age”, as an exasperated Trump threatens to do?
Larry expressed cautious optimism to Curtis that an eleventh-hour deal might happen on Tuesday night: “I hope and I think that there are some more reasonable people in charge of Iran right now, and we learned that when they gave that gesture of opening up the Strait of Hormuz. And the demands that you read earlier, the demands from Iran that you read earlier, they’re reasonable. They’re not crazy demands, like in the past. So I think something’s going to happen. Maybe it’s just me, maybe it’s hopeful thinking… (but) I think, by eight o’clock, we are going to have some type of agreement that’s going to hold off this wiping out of civilization.”
A much more pragmatic Curtis, however, believes we have done enough and should leave the problem of Iran to be resolved by the Israelis: “How about an agreement where everyone can save face, everybody declares victory, we pack our bags, get the hell out of there and leave it to the Israelis. Give them whatever they want; they want to continue this war, this sort of religious idea that Bibi (Netanyahu) has that he’s going to wipe out all these enemies that he’s had- go ahead, Bibi, knock yourself out. And then, obviously Iran, the global jihadists, knock yourself out. Can we just get back to the business of taking care of America?”
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