June 30, 2019 "Information Clearing House" -  President Hassan Rouhani of Iran got it right on Tuesday. He said that the White House is “afflicted by mental retardation and doesn’t know what to do”.

Donald Trump’s new sanctions may not be as “outrageous and idiotic” as Rouhani claims, but we’ve now reached a stage where the American president’s mental incapacity is plain for all to see. It is a sign of the times – our times, I’m afraid – that all the rantings and ravings of Iran’s leaders over the past 40 years at last sound clear cut, true, absolutely on the cue. Trump is crackers, barmy, off the wall, categorically lunatic.

Rouhani is a sane man, but in the past we could listen to folk like President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who was crackers, and take a chuckle at Iran’s expense. Talk of the “Great Satan” could even get a bit boring after a while. But Trump, while possessing some of the characteristics of Colonel Gaddafi, now sounds like Ahmadinejad. The only thing he has left to say – as Ahmadinejad claimed – is that a holy cloud hung over his head when he addressed the United Nations.

But wait. It’s sure to come. God’s work looms high in the brains of the evangelical Republicans. And Trump has now proved that he can be as batty as any Middle East autocrat.

I can even remember the day, early in his presidency, when I said in an Irish radio interview that Trump was “insane”. In those days, this was considered a little too provocative and my interviewer muttered something along the lines of “Well, Bob, you don’t have medical qualifications.” The difference now, of course, is that the world knows that the White House is a mad house. (My reply to my Irish colleague, by the way, was that if I had claimed Trump to be completely sane, he would not have queried whether I could say that without being a doctor.)

No matter. We have Jared Kushner trying to give the Palestinians cash rather than a state, apparently still backed up at his Bahrain bash by the autocrats of the Arab Gulf. To see Tony Blair, one of the west’s biggest failures in the Middle East, trying to teach the bizarrely overconfident Kushner that there’s got to be a state for the Palestinians as well as the $50bn “Peace to Prosperity” plan was only matched by Kushner’s ridiculous property developer’s talk about “issues” and “negativity”. The longest foreign occupation in modern history, of the West Bank by the Israelis, does indeed throw up a number of “issues” – such as the massive property theft for Israel’s colonial expansion project – which do cause quite a lot of “negativity”.

I do sometimes wonder if this weird sequence of events, not to mention the destruction of America’s more-than-$120m drone by Iran, has been set in motion by a massive collapse of mental integrity and ability in the west – not just in America, but in Europe as well.