Letters to the Editor - April 30, 2026

Response to ‘Confronting evil’

Gentlemen: Your letter lays out the historical facts clearly and accurately. There is no way to excuse or condone the behavior you chronicle. I agree with your opening paragraph but am troubled by the implication that this war could not be avoided.

Perhaps more diplomacy would have been the equivalent of appeasement but I am uncertain.

Operation Midnight Hammer on June 22, 2025 failed to solve the problem. The question raised then and again now is the gray area regarding presidential authority to engage in war without congressional approval. History illustrates the uncertain outcomes of similar conflicts. It is too early to judge the wisdom of the choices made by our current administration. I shared your letter with Perplexity, an AI provider.

Perplexity says: “The letter presents the war as the unavoidable price of finally confronting a malevolent regime, which is a coherent argument — but it omits the role that specific policy choices (particularly the 2018 JCPOA withdrawal) played in accelerating the nuclear crisis it describes. Whether war was truly unavoidable, or whether different diplomacy could have prevented it, depends heavily on assumptions about Iranian intentions that remain genuinely debated among serious foreign policy thinkers.

The letter is an opinion piece by concerned citizens, not a policy analysis — so it argues a point of view rather than weighing all the evidence. That is entirely legitimate, but a reader should be aware they are getting one side of a complex argument.”

“The Case That War Was Unavoidable”

Perplexity

• Iran repeatedly rebuffed diplomatic overtures across multiple administrations — Carter, Reagan, Clinton, Obama, Trump — suggesting no negotiated solution was achievable

• Iran continued enriching uranium even during the JCPOA period, and after the U.S. withdrew in 2018, accelerated its program to the point of being weeks away from weapons-grade material

• The letter’s implicit argument is that each concession or delay only bought Iran more time to build missiles, fund proxies, and approach nuclear capability — making eventual confrontation more dangerous, not less

• Some serious analysts argue that a nuclear-armed Iran would have been permanently destabilizing, making a conventional war now preferable to nuclear deterrence under a hostile theocracy”

“The Case That War Could Have Been Avoided”

Perplexity

• The JCPOA (2015 nuclear deal) was working — IAEA inspectors confirmed Iran was in compliance when the U.S. unilaterally withdrew in 2018. Many foreign policy experts argue that staying in the deal, or negotiating a stronger one, offered a credible non-military path

• The Trump administration’s withdrawal from the JCPOA directly triggered Iran’s uranium acceleration — the crisis the letter describes was in part a consequence of that decision, not an inevitability

• Coercive diplomacy backed by sanctions had demonstrably constrained Iranian behavior at various points; critics argue it was never given sufficient time or consistency

• Several of Iran’s most aggressive proxy actions (the October 7 attack, Hezbollah’s rocket campaign) were responses to specific events — they were not simply predetermined

• Historical precedent: the U.S. reached arms agreements with the Soviet Union despite profound ideological hostility, suggesting negotiated coexistence with adversarial regimes is possible”

Philip V. Oppenheimer

Lakeville

Omissions in ‘surging gas prices’ article

Last week’s front-page article, “Surging gas prices stretch local budgets,” was timely and certainly of interest to everyone. However, I noted two obvious omissions. One, there was no mention of local governments adjusting their budgets by reducing spending as most families must do when confronted by rising prices in the face of fixed incomes. When costs rise for essential commodities such as gasoline, the logical response is to temporarily cut back on spending for non-essential things like entertainment and eating out, or postponing major purchases. The economy is cyclical and the cost of gasoline fluctuates. It will not remain high forever. Budgets can always be readjusted when things return to what passes for normal – for families and local governments, alike.

Speaking of which, the present cost of gasoline has risen from approximately $3.00 a gallon a year ago to about $4.00 presently. This is due to our current conflict with Iran, something which began 47 years ago. The Iranian mullahs declared war on us but we never responded. Every president just kicked the can down the road, expecting a successor to deal with it. “It,” of course, was the threat of a nuclear attack as soon as they completed a weapon to use. They got closer and closer until President Trump moved preemptively to eliminate the threat. Geopolitics are complicated and things do not get resolved overnight. The rest of us need to practice patience.

I noted one more thing in the article. While the cost of a gallon of gasoline rose from $3.00 to its current $4.00 in the past year, nowhere in was it mentioned that the average weekly retail gasoline price hit an all-time high of $5.07 a gallon in 2022 when Joseph Biden was President. Most people seem to have selective amnesia.

Richard Kopec

Sharon