Obama’s Iran
‘Agreement’ Is a Charade Secretary of state
by Thomas
Sowell April 7, 2015 12:00 AM
No such
agreement exists, and even if it did, we couldn’t trust the mullahs to submit
to inspections. By abandoning virtually all its demands for serious
restrictions on Iran’s nuclear-bomb program, the Obama administration has
apparently achieved the semblance of a preliminary introduction to the
beginning of a tentative framework for a possible hope of an eventual agreement
with Iran. But even this hazy “achievement” may vanish like a mirage. It takes
two to agree — and Iran has already publicly disputed and even mocked what
President Obama says is the nature of that framework. Had Iran wholeheartedly
agreed with everything the Obama administration said, that agreement would
still have been worthless, since Iran has already blocked international
inspectors from its nuclear facilities at unpredictable times.
The appearance of international control is
more dangerous than a frank admission that we don’t really know what they are
doing. Why then all these negotiations? Because these charades protect Barack
Obama politically, no matter how much danger they create for America and the
world. The latest public-opinion polls show Obama’s approval rating rising. In
political terms — the only terms that matter to him — his foreign policy has
been a success. If you look back through history, you will be hard pressed to
find a leader of any democratic nation so universally popular — hailed
enthusiastically by opposition parties as well as his own — as was British
prime minister Neville Chamberlain when he returned from Munich in 1938, waving
an agreement with Hitler’s signature on it, and proclaiming “Peace for our
time.” Who cared that he had thrown a small country to the Nazi wolves in order
to get a worthless agreement with Hitler? It looked great at the time because
it had apparently avoided war.
Now Barack Obama seems ready to repeat
that political triumph by throwing another small country — Israel this time —
to the wolves, for the sake of another worthless agreement. Back in 1938,
Winston Churchill was one of the very few critics who tried to warn Chamberlain
and the British public. Churchill said: “The idea that safety can be purchased
by throwing a small State to the wolves is a fatal delusion.” After the ruinous
agreement was made with Hitler, he said: “You were given the choice between war
and dishonor. You chose dishonor and you will have war.” Chamberlain’s “Peace
for our time” lasted just under a year.
Comparing Obama to Chamberlain is unfair —
to Chamberlain. There is no question that the British prime minister loved his
country and pursued its best interests as he saw it. He was not a “citizen of
the world,” or worse. Chamberlain was building up his country’s military
forces, not tearing them down, as Barack Obama has been doing with American
military forces.
Secretary of State John Kerry and other
members of the Obama administration are saying that the alternative to an
agreement with Iran is war. But when Israel bombed Iraq’s nuclear reactors,
back in 1981, Iraq did not declare war on Israel. It would have been suicidal
to do so, since Israel already had nuclear bombs. There was a time when either
Israel or the United States could have destroyed Iran’s nuclear facilities,
with far less risk of war than there will be after Iran already has its own
stockpile of nuclear bombs. Indeed, the choice then will no longer be between a
nuclear Iran and war. The choice may be between surrender to Iran and nuclear
devastation. Barack Obama dismissed the thought of America being vulnerable to
“a small country” like Iran. Iran is in fact larger than Japan was when it
attacked Pearl Harbor, and Iran has a larger population. If Japan had nuclear
bombs, World War II could have turned out very differently. If anyone examines
the hard, cold facts about the Obama administration’s actions and inactions in
the Middle East from the beginning, it is far more difficult to reconcile those
actions and inactions with a belief that Obama was trying to stop Iran from
getting nuclear weapons than it is to reconcile those facts with his trying to
stop Israel from stopping Iran from getting nuclear weapons. This latest
“agreement” with Iran — with which Iran has publicly and loudly disagreed — is
only the latest episode in that political charade. —
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