Israel Matzav

Another Obama epic fail

Two articles over the weekend chronicle President Obama's epic screw-up of Iran: Barry Rubin and Charles Krauthammer. Here's Rubin:

The Biblical verse Deuteronomy 30 quotes God as saying: I have set before thee life and death, the blessing and the curse; therefore choose life that thou may live….”

This notion of choice is the basis for Obama Administration policy toward Iran. And as in the Bible the “correct” choice seems rather obvious. Who would not choose “life”?

...

Obama’s proposition is completely bogus. Now, in what used to be the normal USA, there would be lots of newspaper articles, television news items and shows, editorials, experts, foreign policy establishment dignitaries, and academics, etc., who would be pointing this out. Yet this kind of thing rarely or never happens nowadays. Sure, there are certainly critics—at least outside the MSM—but how many present a sophisticated analysis that could convince policymakers?

All of this doesn’t mean that someone should attack Iran militarily. The alternative strategy is a coherent strategic campaign to counter Iranian influence on every level—nuclear weapons are only a part, I’m tempted to say a small part, of the problem–by allying everyone threatened by Iran. This is an idea that has not even entered the national debate on this issue.

But Obama’s argument on Iran–the one he will surely use in his run for reelection–is nonsensical.

And Krauthammer:

He began his presidency apologetically acknowledging U.S. involvement in a coup that happened more than 50 years ago. He then offered bilateral negotiations that, predictably, failed miserably. Most egregiously, he adopted a studied and scandalous neutrality during the popular revolution of 2009, a near-miraculous opportunity — now lost — for regime change.

Obama imagined that his silver tongue and exquisite sensitivity to Islam would persuade the mullahs to give up their weapons program. Amazingly, they resisted his charms, choosing instead to become a nuclear power. The negotiations did nothing but confer legitimacy on the regime at its point of maximum vulnerability (and savagery), as well as give it time for further uranium enrichment and bomb development.

For his exertions, Obama earned (a) continued lethal Iranian assistance to guerrillas killing Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan, (b) a plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador by blowing up a Washington restaurant, (c) the announcement just this week by a member of parliament of Iranian naval exercises to shut down the Strait of Hormuz, and (d) undoubted Chinese and Russian access to a captured U.S. drone for the copying and countering of its high-tech secrets.

How did Obama answer that one?

On Monday, he politely asked for the drone back.

On Tuesday, with Putin-like contempt, Iran demanded that Obama apologize instead. “Obama begs Iran to give him back his toy plane,” reveled the semiofficial Fars News Agency.

Just a few hours earlier, Secretary Clinton asserted yet again that “we want to see the Iranians engage. . . . We are not giving up on it.”

Blessed are the cheek-turners. But do these people have no limit?

Apparently not. The only way to limit them is to throw them out.

Labels: Barack Hussein Obama, Iranian nuclear program

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 1:40 PM