Obama’s Iran Deal: A Ruse to Inure Americans to the Fact that We Are Empowering Our Enemy

Back in April, when the Obama administration announced the “framework” that wasn’t, I opined that the drawn-out Iran negotiations (to be followed by an elongated, process-heavy agreement that incrementally gives the jihadist regime everything it wants) was just theater to enervate the public while our government empowered our enemy. Now that the agreement is here, I don’t see things any differently:

What we have is simply an Obama administration assumption and a timetable. The assumption is that Iran will become a nuclear-weapons power. The timetable involves dragging out the enervating negotiations-to-nowhere for as long as it takes to inure Americans to the prospect of a nuclear Iran . . .

Iran has built its foreign policy around the goal of “Death to America” for the last 36 years. It continues, unabashed, to be the world’s leading state sponsor of jihadist terrorism — in particular, anti-American terrorism. It has killed and abetted the killing of Americans throughout the current regime’s existence. It is a totalitarian sharia state that, at this moment, is imprisoning at least three Americans. One of them, Saeed Abedini, has been sentenced to eight years’ incarceration for establishing Christian houses of worship, which the regime says is a threat to national security. The regime, further, has repeatedly vowed to exterminate Israel, our close ally and the only true democracy in the region.

With such a rogue state, there is only one negotiation a sensible nation — particularly the world’s most powerful nation — can have. You tell them that until they convincingly disavow their anti-American stance, cease their support for terrorism, release American prisoners, and acknowledge Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, that there is no point in discussing anything else.

This is not complicated. It is not, as Obama would have us believe, a call to invade Tehran at midnight and keep 300,000 American troops there for a decade or three. You tell the mullahs that the basic tenets of their existing government make it an enemy regime, so naturally our response must be to use every component of our government — financial, treasury, trade, diplomacy, law-enforcement, intelligence, and military — to punish the Iranian regime until it reforms or disappears. You tell them that, in view of their posture toward our country and our allies, and of their violation of international commitments and resolutions, we regard their nuclear and ballistic-missile programs as unacceptable. Without committing to any specific tactic or set of tactics to undo them, you convey that we are quite serious about taking no options off the table.

Is it true, as the president likes to say, that we should never be afraid to negotiate? Only if we enter negotiations with a firm grasp of our bottom-line requirements. Those must be non-negotiable. We should be afraid of “negotiations” that entail abandoning bottom-line requirements. If that’s what “negotiation” means, it’s just a euphemism for selling out our national interests. They wouldn’t be national interests if they could be compromised without fearful consequences.

In the middle of their negotiations with Obama, the mullahs had one of their top military commanders announce that, as far as Iran is concerned, “erasing Israel off the map” is “nonnegotiable.” That is one of their bottom-line requirements. Obama’s job is to move them off their bottom line, not erase ours.

He isn’t even trying. Thus, the details of Obama’s negotiations with the mullahs are beside the point; the fact that we are negotiating becomes a humiliating defeat — an implicit admission that we accept Iran’s aggression….

Such disdain does the Iranian regime have for the United States, such contempt for our president and his desperation, that Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei won’t even allow Obama the pretense of a deal. With relish, he mocked the president’s phony “framework” this week, declaring the undeniable truth that there is no agreement, that the parties are not even close on the fundamental elements of a pact, and that the “White House fact sheet” is the product of “lying and breaching promises.”

When not smiling across the table at our smitten secretary of state, Iran’s foreign minister can be found laying a wreath at the grave of Hezbollah commander Imad Mugniyah, the man who orchestrated, among countless other atrocities, the 1983 attack that killed 241 U.S. Marines in Beirut. Two weeks ago, while the hapless Secretary Kerry hailed supposed progress in the negotiations, Khamenei reaffirmed his call for “Death to America.” As the negotiations limped along, Iran-backed jihadists known as the Houthis ousted the government of Yemen, triggering the emergency abandonment of the U.S. embassy and potentially enabling Iran to disrupt key commercial sea lanes while establishing a menacing presence on Saudi Arabia’s border. Iranian military officials continue to proclaim that “the American Navy is one of our targets”; just a few weeks ago, as Obama’s negotiations entered what was portrayed as the critical phase, Iran fired ballistic missiles at a mock-up of a U.S. aircraft carrier during naval exercises in the Strait of Hormuz.

Some negotiations. They thunder about attacking us. We twaddle about how many thousands of centrifuges they should keep.