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THINK-ISRAEL |
Iran is openly developing the means to produce nuclear weapons and blatantly announcing it will test its products on Israel. She has no moral or religious inhibitions. She has no hesitation about waging nuclear warfare. There is also Iran's history. During the Iran-Iraq war, to protect her soldiers, Iran used 100,000 of her children to explode land mines. So the fact that bombing Israel will also doom thousands if not millions of Muslims is unlikely to deter her. With no compunction about using nuclear weaponry and the resources to hit anywhere in the Middle East, Europe and the USA, she instantly becomes a class-A political power, capable of forcing her will and religious ideas not only on the countries in the Middle East, but globally by nuclear blackmail and by forcing disruptions in the oil supply. Yet the Western countries and China don't treat her ambitions as an urgent matter. They dither and talk while Iran tests and gets ready.
Why is this so? Two theories predominate: (1) the west is naive and western leaders are so eager for a "final solution" resolution, they have swallowed Iran's reassuring lies whole, as did Chamberlain, who believed Hitler's promises in the 1930s; and (2) Obama is an unindicted co-conspirator of Iran's nuclear ambitions. The first notion is presented excellently well by David Daoud in an article entitled "The rise of the Iranian Empire":
"Unfortunately, the perception of progress [in halting the development of nuclear weapons] in regard to Iran is entirely inaccurate. The West, it seems, has been taken in by Iranian misdirection, a skill at which the Islamic Republic excels. Iran has Western leaders preoccupied with its nuclear program and has convinced them that they are making progress on the issue. In fact, Iran is moving closer to producing a nuclear weapon, and the West has been steadily moving towards acceding to Iranian demands."
More specifically, according to the AP, the shocker is:
The United States and Iran are shaping the contours of a deal that would initially freeze Tehran's nuclear program but would allow it to slowly ramp up activities that could be used to make nuclear arms over the last years of the agreement's duration... The idea would be to reward Iran for good behavior over the last years of any agreement, by gradually lifting constraints on its uranium enrichment program imposed as part of a deal that would also would slowly ease sanctions on the Islamic Republic.
Iran says it does not want nuclear arms and needs enrichment only for energy, medical and scientific purposes, but the U.S. fears Tehran could re-engineer the program to its other potential use — producing the fissile core of a nuclear weapon. The U.S. initially sought restrictions lasting for up to 20 years; Iran had pushed for less than a decade. Iran could be allowed to operate significantly more centrifuges than the U.S. administration first demanded, though at lower capacity than they currently run. Several officials spoke of 6,500 centrifuges as a potential point of compromise.
Omri Ceren, writing in Commentary Magazine, adds specifics:
Then 10 or maybe 15 years later, a "sunset clause" —which the Iranians have successfully demanded be built into any comprehensive deal—would take effect. It would allow any and all of the agreement's restrictions to be lifted. The mullahs will have waited out the West, and they will have amassed a sprawling nuclear program in the meantime.
Even that deal was apparently not good enough for the Iranians, and so another six-month extension was worked out in November. The administration is back on Capitol Hill assuring lawmakers that progress is being made, that they need just a little more time. And then what? In six months' time, the West will be in a worse position to extract concessions from Iran. The Iranians will be in a better position to walk away. The spectacle will provide an interesting test case for scholars who evaluate the relative sway of deliberation versus raw political power. Everybody else will be watching to see how many senators and representatives are willing to get played for chumps again, as the most immediate danger to global stability and peace in the 21st century comes closer and closer to reality.
Prez Obama described the bad deal that was under negotiation with Iran this way:
"for the first time in a decade, we've halted the progress of [Iran's] nuclear program and reduced its stockpile of nuclear material."
This misstates the situation with a bold lie. The essay by Josh Block of The Israel Project (January 22, 2015) indicates that Obama is taking a surprisingly active role in supporting Iran's program by whitewashing it and blocking opposition:
For over a year the admin has claimed, falsely, that Iran's nuclear program has been "frozen" & their "progress halted" during the talks — talks we were told would only last 6 months, yet are now heading toward 19 months (June 30th). FAR FROM being "halted", during the negotiations, Iran has enriched at least one more bomb's worth of material, has advanced its plutonium track to 87% completion, and just announced it will build 2 more nuclear facilities. Does that sound "frozen" to you? Not to mention other facts that contradict WH claims.
Tonight the President has threatened, again, to veto bipartisan legislation from Menendez-Kirk by implying FALSELY that (1) it contains sanctions on Iran at this time and (2) will guarantee diplomacy will fail.
Those are ridiculous claims. First, the bill imposes no sanctions on Iran during talks what so ever. If there is a deal by 6/30 — a deadline the president set and says will tell us if Iran is willing to make a deal or not — there are no sanctions.
Second, it is totally counter-intuitive to suggest that Iran will walk away from nuclear talks it desperately needs to save its broken economy because of some sanctions that will never come into being if there is an agreement — which they claim they want.
The second supposition — that Obama is secretly aiding and abetting Iran's nuclear program — is more a matter of seeing a pattern in who benefits from Obama's actions and who he would destroy because this 'enemy' disagrees with him. It's a matter of watching his hands, not his lips. It is true that Israel and the USA view the Iranian threat differently. The USA would like to link the unimpeded Iranian development of weaponry to some show of civility on Iran's part — this would reassure the politicians the mullahs were rational and can be trusted — while Israel and the Sunni states of Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan, with more regional knowledge and more to lose, would like to hobble Iran's ability to make weapons under any condition. But this difference in perception doesn't per se explain Obama's fury at Israel's Prime Minister voiced distrust of Iran's unswerving intentions.
What is more significant is that Obama has consistently thwarted Israel's desire to stop Iran's nuclear program He has "leaked" the information on routes Israel would take should it try to take the Iran nuclear plants out. He has stalled Israel's attempts to take out Iran's nuclear program, giving Iran the time both to grow and fortify these facilities, all the while mouthing untrustworthy reassurances of American concern with Israel's safety. With a warped sense of priorities, Obama is angrily certain that Israel building houses in Samaria and Judea destroys all chance for peace in the region but he's complaisant about Iran's gaining the bomb, which will rearrange political power in the Middle East to the detriment of America and its allies. As Jeffrey Herf (see here) writes:
"For six years, Barack Obama has insisted that the policy of the United States remains that of preventing Iran from attaining nuclear weapons. For that same six years, the negotiating position of the United States has moved closer to those of Iran. As a result, there are serious, well-informed people in Washington who believe that the actual policy of the administration is to accept an Iranian bomb and then institute a policy of deterrence."
Obama's inability to call Muslims terrorists or jihadists has been noted time and again. There is too the observation that Obama catered to the Sunnis — the infamous picture of Obama's bowing to the Saudi King — but when the Saudis and Egypt went sour on the Muslim Brotherhood (MB), a terrorist organization that Obama insists is moderate, Obama switched to the Shi'ites, voicing the belief that Iran could be a big help fighting ISIS with us. On an earlier occasion, when Iranians took to the street protesting the rigged election that gave the presidency to Ahmadinijad, he withheld support, calling it an internal matter. But he didn't mind meddling in Egypt's internal affairs, first forcing Hosni Mubarak from office and later withholding resources from Egypt when the Muslim Brotherhood candidate Mohamed Morsi was kicked out of office by the Army and MB declared a treasonous organization.
Is there a way to choose which supposition is correct? Possibly. If the Muslim Brotherhood should make gestures of returning to the Sunni fold, and should Obama follow suit, we can consider this as an amazing coincidence. Or it might be a strong indication that Obama's major objective is supporting the Muslim Brotherhood, not pursuing American interests.
Bernice Lipkin is managing editor of Think-Israel.