I often see events, moments, and actions, which serve to define the times and persons involved. An individual choice can serve as an illustration of the overall pattern of a lifetime or career.
President Obama’s deal with Iran is one of those events. He is following a pattern we have seen already in trying to deal with both the economy and healthcare. That pattern in a nutshell is, for the sake of striking a deal now, we will push off the pain of the situation for later.
I am writing this blogpost after watching a press conference where President Obama tried to convince the nation to accept the Iran Nuclear Deal. This is the capper that I believe will be seen by historians as the defining moment of Obama’s presidency. It might be true that he will keep his promise, “Iran will not obtain a nuclear weapon on my watch.” But his actions open the door for Iran to have that weapon later. Iran will be able to reintroduce many of the tools for building a weapon in 10 or 15 years, according to this plan.
There are three ingredients to all of President Obama’s bad deals.
- Believing that the world has to come alongside us and agree with our choices.
- Believing that when his administration does something it will work, even if previous administration did the same things and it failed for them.
- Tunnel vision to complete a deal, so that the devil in the details is overlooked.
In his speech he pointedly stated, “With the world now unified beside us.” This is nice. But I remember a time when we lead the world. We did not wait for them to come alongside us before acting, but instead we lead out. We did what we knew was right, and yes, the world often followed. They did so because they saw us, even trusted us, to do right.
The president assures us this deal is “Ensuring that all pathways to a bomb are shut off.” He lists reasons that he believes this. Part of it is the bomb making tools and facilities they are temporarily not allowed to use. But the majority of this is because he is assuming the inspections set up under his deal will do what all the previous inspections failed to do. He believes this even though the kind of stalling tactics Iran has consistently used against us, are worked into this agreement. Everyone, including the Obama Administration, expects Iran to cheat on the deal. So why allow them to work the framework for cheating into the arrangements?
Finally, the Iran deal is a case of being so intent on reaching a deal that they overlooked how all the compromises added up to empowering the worst disaster the world has seen thus far. This tunnel vision is the only valid reason why they would continue blindly extending the deadlines to complete the deal. A nasty component of this tunnel vision is that prior to narrowing our field of view we would have stood up to Iran as an enemy because of its terrorist activities, and should be opposed for this reason regardless of whether they are trying to build a bomb.
President Obama says we have two choices, take the deal or go to war. I think it’s somewhat predictable we will have to go to war sooner or later. First because Iran will not give up their goals. They will continue to try and get a nuclear weapon. But also because they will continue to be a state sponsor of terrorism against us and our allies. And also because they will continue to desire the absolute destruction of Israel. President Obama is just putting off the pain of this battle until later.
Charles W. Short 