Cashing checks that our mouth can’t write. It’s not only the inside-out version of an overused cliché; it has also been our foreign policy in Iran for the past ten years. The U.S. government has been billing Iran as the biggest threat to the American people. So that’s why it did not surprise me, when I read in the New York Times, that our government has awarded “$107 billion in contract payments, grants and other benefits over the past decade to foreign and multinational American companies while they were doing business in Iran.” It did not surprise me, because this kind of phantom funding has become a staple of our government’s foreign policy. Tell the people that a nation is a threat to our security, but don’t let it get in the way of business. It’s like giving a guy a restraining order, and then buying him a gun.

So now when our leaders announce that they are placing a country under economic sanctions, take that as an announcement that we are going to give that country $107 billion dollars. If our foreign policy wasn’t already confusing and contradictory enough, this really throws a wrench in our government’s propaganda system. Is Iran still a threat to America? Was it ever a threat to America? We may never know. But we do know one thing about our government’s world view: nuclear weapons or not, Iran is good for business.

What’s most amazing is that this revelation will not faze the people or the government from continuing their harmonious relationship of blind faith and lies. This story is on the front page of the New York Times, yet most won’t hear about it, few will care, and the government will brush it off with one of many excuses. I try to take the government seriously some of the time, but they’ve now made it almost impossible. I think the federal government’s PR department must be playing a game back at the office: how bad can we lie to these idiots and have them will still believe us? I’ve checked out of this game a long time ago, but this current fiasco provides some comforting thoughts. Is there any nation in this world that is such a threat to America, that it means halting business with them? Clearly there is not. The only threat is the truth, and there’s no money to be made by realizing it.