Obama’s Infinite Nuclear Deadlines for Iran : Daniel Greenfield
http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/259412/obamas-infinite-nuclear-deadlines-iran-daniel-greenfield
Only the final deadline will be deadly.
“We are certainly not going to sit at the negotiating table forever,” John Kerry said. That was last year around the time of the final deadline which had been extended from July 2014.
“New ideas surfaced” in the final days, he claimed and “we would be fools to walk away”. That’s also the theme of every sucker caught in a rigged card game, MLM scheme and Nigerian prince letter scam.
Smart people walk away after getting cheated. Only fools stay.
The final deadline was extended to March. White House spokesman Josh Earnest said in March that, “I think it’s fair to say that we’ve reached our limit, right now, in as far as the conversations have been going on for more than a year.”
The March deadline was extended until the end of June.
Earnest said earnestly that the Obama Squad was ready to walk away even before June 30. An official claimed, “No one is talking about a long-term extension. No one.”
The Iranians had a good laugh and sent the US negotiators out to fetch them some coffee and smokes.
The latest deadline, which also lapsed, has been extended to Friday while the interim agreement from two years ago, which Iran violated by buying equipment for a plutonium reactor, testing new centrifuges and continuing enrichment, was extended.
That’s the same agreement that Secretary of State John Kerry claimed that Iran had kept even while his own State Department was secretly telling the United Nations Security Council that Iran had violated it.
But Kerry was almost coherent compared to European Union foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini who stated that, “We are continuing to negotiate for the next couple of days. This does not mean we are extending our deadline.”
When you don’t treat a deadline as final, that means it’s being extended. A deadline that isn’t kept, isn’t a deadline. It’s an ex-deadline pining for the peaceful Iranian fjords.
But Federica explained that the deadlines weren’t being extended, they were being “interpreted… in a flexible way.” A flexible deadline is a good metaphor for the Obama negotiating posture.
If the negotiators can’t even make one of many deadlines stick, who really believes they’ll stand their ground on nuclear inspections or sanctions snapback? But instead of taking a stand, Obama’s people are admitting that the deadlines are dead and want to get rid of the deadlines, timetables and standards.
We’ve gone from “No deal is better than a bad deal” to “No deadline is better than a bad deadline.”
Josh Earnest belatedly admitted that the Obama Squad weren’t going to walk away from the talks no matter what deadlines were crossed making the deadlines deader than Obama’s credibility.
Now Earnest has promised that the United States “won’t walk away from the table as long as the negotiations continue to be useful.”
‘Useful’ is a really vague term that could mean anything at all. The negotiations might be useful in perhaps convincing the Iranians to one day meet a deadline that even our side no longer bothers with. Maybe the negotiations will be useful in obtaining another Nobel Peace Prize for Obama. But really the only ones who have gotten any use out of the otherwise useless negotiations are the tyrants of Tehran.
As J.E. Dyer, a retired Naval Intelligence officer, pointed out in her latest column, “It’s better for Iran to get everything she truly wants without having to let a deal happen.”
Our leaders are very invested in putting things down on pieces of paper. The only pieces of paper that Iran is interested in are those inside their Korans and in their foreign bank accounts.
Aside from every other concession that Obama and Kerry have made to the Mullahs, and it is a very long list, they have conceded that the deadlines and the threats that the United States would walk away from the negotiations if the Iranians didn’t give them something, anything at all, were empty threats.
Obama’s people have admitted that they will negotiate until doomsday. And doomsday is likely to be the date that Iran detonates its first bomb.
The deadline concession officially puts Iran in the driver’s seat.
That’s not a big worry for Team Post-USA in Vienna which a recent article tells us has gobbled up, “10 pounds of Twizzlers (strawberry flavored), 20 pounds of string cheese, 30 pounds of mixed nuts and dried fruit, and more than 200 rice krispies treats.”
The boys and girls taking photos of each other passed out and trying to decide who gets to play who in the movie about the negotiations (Kerry would be played by Ted Danson and Marie Harf by Kirsten Dunst) enjoy an atmosphere with “the feel of a college dorm room during exam week.”
Except there’s no exam. All the exams have been cancelled.
Every few months, Marie Harf would quickly brush her hair, hide her bong and clomp out to tell the press that “significant progress” had been made and that they were on the verge of a deal.
Like a teenager telling mom and dad that she would get her grades up “like right now”, Marie didn’t even bother telling convincing lies and the press didn’t even bother pretending they believed her.
Now we’re past the part where Marie Harf tells us that she’ll stop smoking pot and start getting better grades, and when she instead starts selling us on how lucrative a career in medical marijuana can be.
According to Harf, Team Post-USA is “more concerned about the quality of the deal than we are about the clock.” That and getting wasted at Da Capo Pizzeria after every round of negotiations, deciding who will play them in the HBO movie and getting a legacy for Obama after six years of foreign policy failures.
That and the brothels of Vienna which are reportedly busy around the clock as our amateur prostitutes of politics and the press use their expense accounts to consult their professional counterparts.
We are told that Team Jihad and Team Post-USA “have never been closer” to getting that deal. Not in any of the previous years or any of the previous deadlines. And that’s why we don’t need deadlines.
Meanwhile Iranian Foreign Minister Zarif is yelling, “Never try to threaten the Iranians” at poor Federica.
It might be that the representative of the Shiite version of ISIS where women are not allowed to remove hijabs, leave the country or watch soccer games, is not used to females, even those willing to interpret Iranian nuclear deadlines flexibly, talking back to him.
Maybe in keeping with the Iranian Islamic law which tells Muslims that “a woman’s testimony as a witness is worth half that of a man”, Zarif just refuses to take her credibility seriously.
Or after beating all the spirit out of Kerry during previous sessions, he needs someone else to bully.
The agreement has never been closer. That’s why the chants of “Death to America” coming from Iran have never been louder. Each time a deadline lapses, a negotiating team members stuffs her face full of strawberry flavored Twizzlers and Rice Krispie treats, a devil gets his horns and Kerry shuffles out to tell us how much progress has been made and how much closer we are to an agreement.
And meanwhile Iran invades another country or smuggles illegal nuclear parts with wealth from the sanctions relief they’ve been given for a deal they aren’t keeping and deadlines they aren’t meeting.
At the end of last month, European Union foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini said of the nuclear deadline, “If we need to have a couple of additional days more, it’s not the end of the world.”
But eventually it just might be.
The final deadline isn’t set and discarded by Obama’s laughing boys and girls filling their Instagram accounts with selfies and photos of taxpayer-funded Vienna dinners; it’s the dark line at which Iran deploys nuclear weapons which will not be marked by papers, but by zones of fallout, radiation readings, lines of ash and piles of corpses.
That last deadline will be the line where the sand of the Middle East melts and turns to glass.
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