Posted by
Cary Wesberry on Sunday, July 13, 2008 9:39:40 PM
From Matthew Continetti at The Weekly Standard:
Asked how the United States ought to respond to last week's Iranian missile tests, Barack Obama told CNN that it was important "we avoid provocation." Just as last year, Obama criticized a Senate bill designating the Iranian Revolutionary Guards a terrorist organization because it was too "provocative." This has us wondering: Is the problem with Iran that the United States seems provocative?
Iran revealed to the world in late 2002 that it had been conducting a secret uranium enrichment program for 15 years. This was a violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, to which Iran is a signatory. Uranium enrichment is the first step on the road to building an atomic bomb. Most everyone seems to agree that Iranian nukes would destabilize the Middle East. What to do?
Obama might not admit it, but for about five years now the Bush administration has followed a course of action rather similar to his preferred policy. Bush has pursued multilateral diplomacy through international institutions (the U.N., the IAEA) and through an ad hoc coalition called the P5+1 (China, France, Germany, Russia, the U.K., and the United States) in order to induce Iran to suspend its enrichment activities. Obama's policy would be a tad more unilateral, because he would prefer to have direct negotiations with the Iranians and thus remove our allies from the equation altogether.
But does any serious person believe that an offer of direct negotiations without preconditions would change the basic situation? Most reasonable advocates of such talks advocate them just so the United States can say it has "gone the extra mile" in trying to persuade Iran to give up its nuclear program.
Read the entire column by following the link above. Amazing. Iran fires-off ballistic missile tests while enriching uranium for nuclear warheads and ignoring all demands from the international community to halt its nuclear program, and Barack Obama thinks the United States is being too provocative.
Provocative. Like when Iran threatens to wipe Israel off the face of the Earth on a daily basis. That kind of provocative? At what point does Obama feel that it is Iran who is being the aggressor and not his own country? I assume at this point that time will come when a huge mushroom cloud is rising over what used to be Tel Aviv.
As Matthew Continetti writes above, the current President has been engaged in the same policy Obama is pushing for when dealing with Iran, without success. The one difference is that Obama wants to have direct talks with Iranian leaders. He wants to sit across the table from the Ayatollah and Ahmadinejad so that he can have his Nixon-goes-to-China moment. Forget about direct talks cutting our allies out of the negotiations. The worst part of this nonsense is how Obama's policy will legitimize Iran and prove to the Ayatollah and Ahmadinejad that they have been taking appropriate action all along.
Not only is Barack Obama going to make matters much worse here at home as far as taxes, energy, and fuel prices go; he will also make our country weaker on the foreign policy front. Obama will show terrorist nations like Iran that they can do whatever they want and in the end we will negotiate with them directly, thereby gaining them even more time to carry out whatever diabolical plan they are working on at the time.