There are other news stories, of course, but the virtually instant disappearance of the negotiations between Obama (not America) and Iran as worth even a mention is astonishing. The majority of the American media, who are as inane as they are ignorant, care about no issue other than whatever it takes to keep a Democrat in the White House. Still, you would think there would be ongoing interest in the terms of the deal and what might be the consequences. It is some consolation that there are people who remain concerned. While Drudge and Instapundit, for example, have gone virtually silent, Powerline and Lucianne continue to treeat this like a story worth examining. Added to the honour role is The Australian today, which carried a front-page story from Greg Sheridan, Obama’s Iranian nuke deal a dismal outcome for the world. I would only differ with Sheridan in that I don’t think Obama was out-negotiated. I think Obama got everything he set out to achieve.
US President Barack Obama has now effectively guaranteed that Iran will eventually acquire nuclear weapons, in what will be a black day for the hopes of peace and stability for anyone in the world.
The Iranian government has out-negotiated Obama completely. They showed more resolve, more cunning and greater strategic patience.
Obama took a strong hand and played it very badly.
The Iranians played a weak hand to perfection. They were forced into negotiations by the overall weakness of their position but have emerged with all the main elements of their nuclear program intact. In time, they will acquire nuclear weapons. Obama will go down in history as the president who made this possible.
The framework that was announced in Lausanne is a most peculiar document. It is unsigned and interpreted differently in Iran, from in the US. It contains very few details. A great deal of the substance of any agreement remains to be negotiated by June 30. However, as Obama, his Secretary of State, John Kerry, and other senior officials constantly claim that the only alternative to this deal is war, they have effectively given away the last shreds of American leverage.
The Iranians know the Obama administration is absolutely desperate to conclude a deal.
All the leverage now rests with the Iranians.
Even the broad terms of the framework as announced contain all manner of key concessions the Americans not so long ago said they would never make.
Among these, Iran gets to keep nuclear facilities, such as its underground Fordow plant, which it developed illegally, in secret, in defiance of the International Atomic Energy Agency. Similarly, it gets to keep its heavy water reactor at Arak, although it will convert it to a facility that for the moment cannot produce plutonium.
It gets to keep 6000 centrifuges to enrich uranium of which 5000 will remain operational. There is no purpose in having these centrifuges other than to eventually produce material for nuclear weapons. It will also be allowed to undertake intensive research on building more advanced centrifuges that can enrich more uranium more quickly. It will not have to export its enriched uranium but merely convert it into a more benign form in a process that can be reversed. And almost all the notional restrictions on Iran run out in 10 years.
There was actually nothing to negotiate. They just had to say, there are sanctions in place, and if you don’t come to the party and stop your nuclear program, they will get even tougher than they already are. Obama’s problem was not how to get the Iranians to dismantle their nuclear program. It was how to remove the sanctions without having the American political system explode around his head. That he most comprehensively has now done. If you think of Obama as an agent of the Iranians, everything becomes perfectly clear.
ROGER SIMON ADDS: I lack sufficient political imagination to follow the non-Iranian pro-Obama perspective. The agreement with Iran cannot possibly be to anyone’s good.
What we have here is not “a failure to communicate,” but Obama’s moral narcissism gone berserk. Forget his former proclaimed views on Iran. Driven by his need for legacy and his conviction that “he knows best” about world peace, the future, whatever, he has reversed course and powered through to what he thinks, or wants us to think, is the framework for a deal that would prevent Iran from fabricating nuclear weapons. Only — as in Gertrude Stein’s Oakland and Amir Taheri’s translations — there’s no there there.
But never mind. His troops seem to be rallying. Democrats who were initially skeptical are apparently folding in and Senator Menendez, Obama’s greatest thorn on the Democratic side, is currently and conveniently being hounded out of office and possibly into prison.
Meanwhile, Dianne Feinstein — whose greatest worry is making sure her and her husband’s hundreds of millions are kept legally separate — is telling Benjamin Netanyahu — whose greatest worry is a second Holocaust – to “contain himself.” (Anyone who thinks a new Holocaust unlikely should read Howard Jacobson’s magnificent new J: A Novel).
And Iran, the mending of whose evil ways was never addressed by the negotiators, is up to its usual mischief, not just expanding across the Middle East from Iraq to Syria to Yemen (we know that), but now — at the same time Obama has told his lap dog Thomas Friedman that America “has Israel’s back” — is making a new alliance with Hamas:
Iran has sent Hamas’s military wing tens of millions of dollars to help it rebuild the network of tunnels in Gaza destroyed by Israel’s invasion last summer, intelligence sources have told The Sunday Telegraph.
It is also funding new missile supplies to replenish stocks used to bombard residential neighbourhoods in Israel during the war, code-named Operation Protective Edge by Israel.
There was a time that in most ways those on the left had a positive view of the world and held an optimistic view of life’s possibilities. The left has now become a collective of the miserable, the self-hating and the angry. They are no longer looking for a better future and a kinder world. They have only destruction in their hearts. ISIS represents the left as it now is and the bitterness so many feel about the world. The harm they do is not accidental. It is their actual intent.
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