RUTHFULLY YOURS

Remember the crowd at the Democrat convention booing Jerusalem?  Obama is lifting sanctions on Iran for them.  He wants to give Democrats a happy feeling over their morning cup of coffee, instead of another stomachache reading about those 5 million people who have lost their health care and will be voting Republican in 2014.

With the fracking revolution bringing down the worldwide price of oil, Iran was finally feeling the economic pinch from sanctions, and facing a restive population.  By lifting sanctions, Obama has saved the mullahs, without getting a halt to their nuclear weapons program in return.  The U.N. goes under the bus, as Obama’s agreement defies the U.N. resolution that sanctions would not be lifted until Iran gives up militarizing uranium.  Kerry couldn’t get Iran to actually stop their weapons program, or close down their plutonium reactor, so our president just said whatever and agreed to lift sanctions anyway.  He wanted an agreement.

It makes you think of a website he wanted — no matter that it wasn’t working.  Or a health care law he wanted — no matter that it would throw eighty million unwilling people off their insurance (the White House’s estimate) and block them from seeing their own doctors. 

Our president, out of his usual combination of incompetence, ideology, and partisan politics, is moving the Middle East to the brink of war and a nuclear arms race.  After five years of secret negotiations, this is his best show: pushing the Israelis and Saudis to the brink of war with Iran.

Democrat “progressive” ideas on national defense date from a hundred years ago — before World War I and World War II, before the 6 million dead Jews, the 20-60 million dead Russians, the 70 million dead Chinese, before the rise of Nazi-infected Islamism in the Arab world, before al-Qaeda and 9/11.

It is no longer 1913.  It is not even 9/10/2001.  We have learned to take demented dictators with modern arms seriously.  The Israelis certainly have.  As before, the Jews are the first targets, considered expendable by an American president. 

The Senate opposition will be token, the media applause loud, the public ignorant and indifferent, and the global geo-politics a disaster of historic proportions. 

Hostility to Israel is now the majority position among Democrat voters.  The threat from a nuclear Iran to Israel’s existence doesn’t make them blink.  Democrats were asked to choose for which side, Israelis or Palestinians, they have more sympathy.  Only 34 percent of Democrats picked Israel (67 percent of Republicans did).

Obama may not understand the economy, the health care system, energy policy, or national security, but he understands how to pander to his base.  The domestic politics motivating the president’s decision to bow to Iran is obvious in the many happy editorials and blog posts from the Democrat media.  They are announcing peace in our time and delighting in the discomfort of Republicans.  Trusting Iran and other Islamist entities, including the Palestinians, has long been a natural policy for liberals.

ObamaCare plays a key role  in two different ways.  Obama is trying to balance the ObamaCare headlines with something his base will like.  He is allowing Iran to go nuclear for the progressives, who consider Israel a colonial power.  It is for the multiculturalists, who keep telling us that Islam is a religion of peace and that if we are only tolerant, they will be also.  It is for the experts aired by NPR, who agree with Obama that it is unfair that the U.S. stops non-Western nations from having the Bomb when we have it.  Most Democrats believe that our supposed belligerence is the real problem.

These are the people who were happy when Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton helped the Nazi-Islamist Muslim Brotherhood depose America’s ally, President Mubarak, in Egypt.  They like the idea of America making concessions to Iran.  It makes them feel good.  This is not a fringe element in their party; it is the mainstream.

Obama supporters think that only rednecks and cowboys see Islamic radicals as enemies of America.  To them, the serious enemies are Tea Party and evangelicals.  They always believed that Obama could turn the Islamists into friends.  Now he is doing it. 

This column by Bob Dreyfuss, an editor at The Nation, reprinted by Bill Moyers, greets the lifting of sanctions as a triumphant assault on the Tea Party, Jews, and hawks — what Dreyfuss calls anti-Iran partisans in Congress.  Dreyfuss happily portrays Obama as closely allied with the interests of the Iranians, who, the author claims, have similarly crushed their own Tea Party.

The politics of the agreement is equally important. President Obama and Secretary of State Kerry signed the deal in explicit, full-frontal defiance of American hawks, neoconservatives and hardliners, the Israel lobby, and anti-Iran partisans in Congress. … President Hassan Rouhani-elected in June with a mandate to do exactly this-have similarly defied their own country’s hardliners and skeptics, led by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and … Iran’s own Tea Party.

Dreyfuss is pleased as can be that Israel is getting it in the neck and dares not disagree too strongly with America.  You can hear his progressive chortling over Jewish fear of a nuclear Iran, fears he dismisses with contempt  as “that card.”

Israel‘s reaction is, predictably, apoplectic. Naftali Bennett, Israel’s economic minister, said, “If five years from now a nuclear suitcase explodes in New York or Madrid, it will be because of the deal that was signed this morning.” But Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will have trouble playing that card for long, since Israel is drastically isolated from the rest of the world and risks an open break with Washington.

Obama understands this base so well because he is one of them.  Obama is not merely playing for short-term political interest.  He actually believes in what he is doing.  He agrees with the happy talk about how great it is to pivot to a pro-Iran policy.  He, too, feels the personal satisfaction of seeing the Israelis in trouble and fear. 

In this sense, the president is cynically taking advantage of the ObamaCare panic in his own party.  Democrats at risk of losing their seats will allow him to push an appeasement policy so dangerous that normally he would be stopped by outraged bipartisan opposition.

Because of the blow ObamaCare has dealt the party, Democrats can’t afford to embarrass the president with a foreign policy failure.  They, too, are desperate for cheerful New York Times reading for their voters.  Letting Iran go nuclear, even a Mideast war, is not as important to them as their doomed feeling from the ObamaCare launch. 

This is irresponsible politics as its worst: the ObamaCare of foreign policy.

With Obama’s Iran deal, the world balance of power will be permanently transformed.  Obama will achieve his lifelong goal to create what he and his progressive Democrats see as a more equitable world, in which American power is shrunk closer to that of non-white, non-Western nations. 

Even before Kerry had time to lobby Congress on the deal, Iran was boasting that it would never give up its nuclear weapons program, and that the agreement did not require it to do so.  Nor have the Iranians even felt obliged to shut up for one minute with their Mein Kampf crowd-pleasers.  Just four days ago:

Iran’s “Supreme Leader” Ayatollah Khameni has assured his militiamen that Israel is “doomed to failure and annihilation.” In the same speech, which was broadcast live on State television, Khameni added that “Zionist leaders cannot be called humans.”

This matters not at all to the White House.  Secretary of State Kerry still went to the Senate to aggressively pitch lifting sanctions.  You’d think Kerry would be embarrassed that he failed to get a promise, however false, from the Iranians to stop producing weapons-grade uranium.  From powerlingblog.com:

Sen. Mark Kirk described Kerry’s pitch as “very unconvincing” and “fairly anti-Israel.”  According to Kirk, Kerry asked the Senators to disbelieve everything the Israelis were telling him. A Committee staffer added that every time a Senator mentioned the Israelis, Kerry would cut the Senator off and admonish that “you have to ignore what they are telling you.”

Kerry was considerably more deferential when it came to the Iranians. Before entering the session, he told reporters that new sanctions would “break faith” with the Iranians.

The choice between breaking faith with Israel and breaking faith with Iran is an easy one for this administration. For Kerry and Obama, the Israelis are liars and oppressors. The Iranians are trustworthy peace partners, more sinned against than sinning.

Why is Obama enabling a nuclear Iran, a change of policy the Saudis called “incomprehensible“?  It is not incomprehensible if you’ve been paying attention to who our president is — his Dreams from My Father.

Like other Democrats, Obama believes that it is a great good to disarm America.  Shrinking American military power has been one of his greatest goals, his hope for a signature legacy.  Disarming America captured President Obama’s imagination in college and remained  a lifelong dream.  He began pushing it as soon as he entered the Oval Office.  He has taken the anti-war motto “it will be a great day when our schools get all the money they need and the military has to have a bake sale to buy a bomber” and enacted it as presidential policy. 

As president, he has dropped the effective American arms doctrine of deterrence and defense in favor of unilateral disarmament, pushing for a one-third cut in our nuclear arsenal and more.

In an even broader assault on our military, the White House has required that the budget cuts of the sequester be uniform, and not applied by the discretion of the U.S. military to preserve key functions.  Obama has succeeded in seriously damaging our military capability, according to his own former defense secretary, Leon Panetta. 

Obama also subscribes to the progressive notion that denying Iran nuclear weapons is a racially tinged “double standard.”  Obama stated in this Cairo speech in 2009: “I understand those who protest that some countries have weapons that others do not.  No single nation should pick and choose which nations hold nuclear weapons.” 

Add in the progressive distaste for Israel and Jews as Western, by definition colonial oppressors, and you can begin to understand why Secretary of State Kerry horrified U.S. senators by repeatedly telling them not to believe the Israelis, but to believe Iranian assurances that all they want is peaceful nuclear power. 

Republicans do not have the power to mobilize the public and stop this disastrous turn of events.

John Bolton has this advice:

Those opposing Obama’s “Munich moment” in Geneva (to borrow a Kerry phrase from the Syrian crisis), should focus on the larger and more permanent strategic problem: A terrorist, nuclear Iran still threatens American interests and allies, and almost certainly means widespread nuclear proliferation across the Middle East. A nuclear Iran would also be essentially invulnerable, providing a refuge that al Qaeda leaders hiding in Afghan and Pakistani caves could only dream of.

So in truth, an Israeli military strike is the only way to avoid Tehran’s otherwise inevitable march to nuclear weapons, and the proliferation that will surely follow. Making the case for Israel’s exercise of its legitimate right of self-defense has therefore never been more politically important.

The real outcome of Obama bowing to Iran is that he is handing off the vital American security interest of stopping Iran from going nuclear to the Saudis and Israelis.  Can they take out Iran’s nuclear capabilities in the face of U.S. opposition?  Will they dither, or will they do it in time?  Can they do it?

If it comes to war, the destructive retaliation Iran will unleash on America, the Middle East, and Europe will be Obama’s signature achievement.  It will outstrip ObamaCare on the Richter scale of self-imposed progressive disasters.

I received this e-mail from a prominent and reserved New England attorney, a man not given to hyperbole:

I truly never thought I’d have a day in the Obama Presidency when I was more disheartened than upon the passage of Obamacare.  But this weekend’s “deal” with Iran topped it for me; I see an unnecessary step toward millions dead and do not think that analogies to Munich are overwrought.