The Patriot Post® · Just Keep Talking
> Update: Good news: Peace in our time!
Nuclear talks with Iran are still going, as negotiators missed Tuesday’s “deadline.” Who could have predicted that? Clearly, extending the deadline on April Fools’ Day bears some significance.
Yet again, Barack Obama has erased a red line. The New York Times reports Obama instructed Secretary of State John Kerry to ignore the deadline, because, as one senior official put it, “[The Iranians] were turning our own deadline against us to see if we would give ground.”
Wait – the Iranians can’t be trusted?
That’s exactly the point. As Thomas Sowell writes, “Recent statements from United Nations officials, that Iran is already blocking their existing efforts to keep track of what is going on in their nuclear program, should tell anyone who does not already know it that any agreement with Iran will be utterly worthless in practice. It doesn’t matter what the terms of the agreement are, if Iran can cheat.”
Worse, Sowell said, “It is amazing – indeed, staggering – that so few Americans are talking about what it would mean for the world’s biggest sponsor of international terrorism, Iran, to have nuclear bombs, and to be developing intercontinental missiles that can deliver them far beyond the Middle East.”
As Mark Alexander wrote yesterday, “The probability of al-Qa'ida and/or Islamic State actors gaining access to a nuclear weapon and then detonating it in the U.S. (most likely in an East Coast urban center) is increasing by the day.”
Furthermore, he said, “Make no mistake, this ‘deal’ is not designed to prevent nuclear terrorism, and at best may just delay it.” That threat means no deal is better than a bad deal.
That echoes the warnings of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose nation lives under constant threat of annihilation by Iran. This week, Netanyahu said, “[A]n Iranian general brazenly declared and I quote: ‘Israel’s destruction is non-negotiable,’ but evidently giving Iran’s murderous regime a clear path to the bomb is negotiable. This is unconscionable.”
Netanyahu added, “Iran’s claim that its nuclear program is only for peaceful purposes doesn’t square with Iran’s insistence on keeping underground nuclear facilities, advanced centrifuges and a heavy water reactor. Nor does it square with Iran’s insistence on developing ICBMs and its refusal to come clean … on its past weaponization efforts.”
What the West should be pressing for is simple, Netanyahu says: “Iran must stop its aggression in the region, stop its terrorism throughout the world and stop its threats to annihilate Israel. That should be non-negotiable and that’s the deal that the world powers must insist upon.”
Obama’s political agenda – the need for a crowning foreign policy “achievement” – will almost surely override these concerns. He has so badly bungled policy in the Middle East that the entire region is collapsing in chaos. And that’s saying something.
“The central issue,” as Alexander put it, “is not whether Iran can be trusted, but that Obama can’t be trusted.