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Having missed a July
deadline for reaching an agreement with Iran over its nuclear program, the six
world powers party to the talks — the United States, Russia, China, France,
United Kingdom and Germany — have set November 24 as their new deadline. Iran says
there will be no extension if a deal isn’t reached.
Given the Obama
administration’s horrible record in the Middle East — treating Israel as an
enemy and Islamic dictatorships as potential friends — things don’t look good
for an agreement that will curtail or reverse Iran’s pursuit of a nuclear
weapon.
An indication of what
the Obama administration hopes to achieve in these talks came from Deputy
National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes. In remarks to a liberal group last
January obtained by the Washington Free Beacon, Rhodes said: “Bottom line is,
this is the best opportunity we’ve had to resolve the Iranian issue
diplomatically, certainly since President Obama came to office, and probably
since the beginning of the Iraq war. … This is probably the biggest thing
President Obama will do in his second term on foreign policy. This is health
care for us, just to put it in context.”
Burnishing a
president’s legacy is not a sufficient reason to trade away American and
Israeli security. That would leave a legacy of the type Neville Chamberlain
left at Munich in 1938 after the “peace” he negotiated with Adolf Hitler.
Because of our secular
diplomats’ refusal to believe the religious motivations of Iran’s leaders, the
United States has placed itself at a disadvantage.
The latest, but by no
means the only example of this denial, is found in the current issue of The
Economist. In a special report titled “The Revolution is Over,” the article
says, “Iran has changed” and its “revolutionary fire has been extinguished.” In
addition, “the traditional religious society that the mullahs dreamt of has
receded” and “pragmatic centrists” are on the rise. Editor-in-Chief John
Micklehwait, writing about the stalled Iran nuclear talks, adds, “…we believe
the prospects of a deal — if not now, eventually — are improving.”
Come again?
This is part of the
wishful thinking that will allow Iran to produce and possibly use a nuclear
weapon against Israel and threaten Europe and the United States.
The problem with the
West’s attitude toward Iran is that it refuses to take seriously the messianic
statements driving Iran’s foreign policy. One question Westerners cannot answer
is this: Why would people who believe they have a direct command from their god
to eradicate Israel and take down the West disobey that god and negotiate an
agreement with “infidels” and especially a country they label “The Great
Satan”? Did their god change his mind?
Some Muslim clerics
claim the Koran gives them the right to lie to “infidels” in pursuit of their
goals, so how do we know they are not lying when they claim their nuclear
objectives are peaceful? If Iran’s intentions are truly peaceful, what’s to
negotiate?
TIME magazine has
assembled some of the more incendiary comments by Iran’s supreme leader, Ali
Khamenei. TIME writes, “He calls America ‘the devil incarnate’ with plans for
‘evil domination of Iran.’ Negotiating with the United States, he said in 2009,
would be ‘naive and perverted.’ He warns that the west is plotting to ‘arouse
sexual desires’ in Islamic Iran, because ‘if they spread unrestrained mixing of
men and women … there will no longer be any need for artillery and guns.’”
Last month, according
to The Washington Free Beacon, “At least two former Iranian nuclear negotiators
joined with Holocaust deniers, 9/11 truthers and anti-Semites from across the
globe … in Tehran for Iran’s second annual New Horizons conference, an
anti-American hate fest that U.S. lawmakers say highlights the country’s
dangerous duplicity.”
Tell me, how do you
negotiate with that?
