As we hurtle toward the twenty-fifth anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks, here’s a quick pop quiz:

• From which country did the vast majority of the 9/11 hijackers come from: Iran, Afghanistan, or Saudi Arabia?

• Which country’s government was responsible for funding and exporting the particular brand of fundamentalist radicalism that drove the 9/11 hijackers and other terrorists: Iran, Afghanistan, or Saudi Arabia?

• Which country’s government officials gave direct material support to an individual directly involved in facilitating the September 11 attack: Iran, Afghanistan, or Saudi Arabia?

If you answered Saudi Arabia for all three, congratulations: you aced the test.

Fifteen of the nineteen hijackers were Saudi nationals. The country’s role in financing and spreading extremism was an open secret in Washington, with Hillary Clinton herself secretly warning that “Saudi Arabia remains a critical financial support base for al-Qaeda, the Taliban, LeT [Lashkar-e-Taiba], and other terrorist groups.” And a series of disclosures have revealed that a Saudi intelligence asset had a hand in not just planning the attack, but assisted, with the help of Saudi consular officials, two of the hijackers in getting set up in the United States — and that he was being paid directly by the Saudi ambassador, a Saudi royal who was also close family friends with then-US President George W. Bush.

Now here’s another question, a two-parter: Out of Iran and Saudi Arabia, which country is the White House currently at war with, ostensibly to stop it from producing a nuclear weapon? And which one is the White House trying to assist in producing the nuclear material it would need to produce an actual weapon?

The first part is easy. Everyone knows the United States is currently at war with Iran, a country the Trump administration likes to say has “waged war against the US for forty-seven years,” even as it’s never been responsible for anything nearly as deadly as the September 11 attack. Part of the reason the war, now in its seventh month, seemingly just won’t end is because the White House and its assorted cheerleaders insist it can only be over on the condition that Iran hand over the stockpile of near-weapons-grade uranium it’s produced and abandon its ambition to enrich any uranium whatsoever in the future.

Fewer Americans know about the second part: that the United States is currently looking to help another state in the region potentially enrich uranium to the exact same level as Iran: Saudi Arabia.

Yes, that’s right. Under the deal that Donald Trump has sent to Congress — and that will become law in less than ninety days unless it’s voted down — the United States will provide the Saudi government the technology and know-how to enrich uranium up to 20 percent. That figure is significant because, as Iran war hawks are fond of telling us, 20 percent enrichment is almost all the way toward reaching weapons-grade uranium and means “the ability to weaponize its nuclear program.”

As the Quincy Institute’s Trita Parsi has pointed out, when Iran first began enriching uranium to 20 percent sixteen years ago, Washington threw a fit, pointing to it as proof “that Iran’s nuclear intentions are anything but peaceful,” in the State Department’s words.

“You do not need to run — as they claim — a civil nuclear program where you’re enriching past 3.67 percent,” Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff said last year when it was Iran’s enrichment program in question.

Trump doesn’t just want to actively help the Saudi elite enrich well past this 3.67 percent threshold. As an added bonus, he’s also given them the gift of not having to submit this enrichment program to the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) more stringent “Additional Protocol” inspections. This was the inspections regime that Iran agreed to, and adhered to, as part of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) — the Iran nuclear deal that Trump and other war hawks have continually attacked as a supposed gift to Tehran and its nuclear weapons ambitions.

In other words, Trump will actively help Saudi Arabia produce the same level of enriched uranium it says is proof positive of a nuclear weapons program when Iran does it but let Saudi Arabia completely avoid the more intrusive inspections that would detect if and when it ever tried to create a nuke that Iran had happily submitted to.

Here you have the topsy-turvy, nonsensical world of Washington foreign policy in a nutshell. The only country with some actual responsibility for the September 11 attacks is one of the few Middle Eastern countries the US government has not started a war with at this point. And in fact, on the eve of the twenty-fifth anniversary of those horrific attacks, the White House is actually rewarding that same country by trying to grant it the ability to produce a nuclear weapon while giving it virtually a free pass on weapons inspections — all while waging an idiotic war with Iran over its identical nuclear program and insisting that Iran must abide by “zero enrichment” of uranium for the rest of time.

All of the concerns that war hawks voice about Iran potentially acquiring a nuke — which, by the way, Trump’s own Director of National Intelligence confirmed last year it was not doing, as US intelligence has been saying for over a decade — apply to Saudi Arabia. If the country acquires a nuclear weapon, or even simply starts to produce weapons-grade uranium without serious international inspections, this could kick off a dangerous nuclear arms race in a region that’s already a tinderbox.

Meanwhile, given Saudi officials’ well-known proximity to and sympathy for extremists, the fear that the government could pass a nuclear weapon on to terrorists — one of the most popular talking points in favor of war with Iran for the past twenty years — is arguably far more acute with Saudi Arabia than Iran.

This agreement is far from a done deal. Trump has publicly said it hinges on a Saudi-Israeli normalization agreement, one that is far from clear will happen, since Israel’s genocide in Gaza, its unfolding annexation of the West Bank, and its general insane daily behavior have so inflamed anti-Israel sentiment in Saudi Arabia that it’s a tough sell even for an autocrat like Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. And Congress could and should still vote it down.

But it’s a good reminder once again of how fundamentally absurd and disconnected from reality Washington foreign policy is. The one terrorist-connected government directly complicit in 9/11 is the one that might be getting help from the White House to potentially produce a nuclear weapon. Some sentences you can still hardly believe even as you type them.