How I would love to be able to reach out and bend the ear of President Trump as he wavers on prosecuting further the Iran conflict.
Such is impossible for a lowly one like me, but I can employ the trite literary device of the open letter, getting my thoughts out to our tiny reading audience if not to the president himself. Dare I dream, word travels?
Here is such a letter.
Dear Donald Trump,
Sir, and I use “sir” in view of your love for the term of respect as evidenced by your penchant for including it while recounting conversations others have had with you, I come to you with a humble suggestion.
That suggestion is to quit trying to negotiate with Iran and instead borrow a page from Vlad The Impaler.
Sir, Vlad had trouble with Muslims back in the late 1400s, when Nancy Pelosi was only a school girl and Chuck Schumer was not yet a dead ringer for Nosferatu. It ended up with Vlad’s father being reduced to a puppet, sort of like Clueless Joe Biden was/is, and Vlad and his brother being imprisoned and tortured.
Sir, allow me to tell you Vlad was a vengeful man. Muslims later demanded tribute in the form of gold – and we know how you revere the yellow metal – and slaves from what then was Wallachia and now is part of Romania. Wallachia was under Vlad’s command. The Islamic emissaries sent with the dictates refused to remove their turbans for religious reasons, so Vlad sent them back to the Sultan with those turbans nailed to their heads.
In a subsequent military action, Vlad disheartened the march of the Sultan’s army upon a Wallachian city by littering the path there with what is reported to have been 20,000 dead Muslim soldiers and sympathizers, impaled on posts.
Sir, the Ottoman Sultan’s army was unnerved and turned back.
Fast-forward to 2026, sir, and unlike Vlad, you have all the cards. You have the superior military, which Vlad did not. You have the superior economy. You have closed Iran down for business.
Yet, sir, you allow them to continue relying on their obfuscation skills developed through thousands of years as sleazy traders of used camels.
Sir, you cannot bargain with these people. Period. Full stop.
I’m not suggesting you impale them, or nail their turbans to their heads.
I am suggesting we stop the negotiating pretense, take out all the remaining infrastructure targets with precision bombing, and allow the blockade of the Strait (Gay?) of Hormuz to strangle the Iran economy.
If and when the Iranians have had enough, demand they walk to some neutral point, arrive there at least a week before the scheduled start of talks, and sit around aimlessly as they have expected our negotiators to do.
Should they try more stalling, misdirection, and flat-out lies, sir, remind them we have many trees in this great land and could come up with millions of poles more easily than, say, more missiles and other munitions.
Mention Vlad. I’m sure his name will ring a bell.
Respectfully,
Sam Ross Jr.
Sam Ross Jr's site 