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BoscoX -> RE: HuffPo Howlers Side With Terroristic Iranian Government (1/1/2018 10:56:39 AM)
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You keep wallowing in that New York Times opinion piece, while the rest of us take in a wider, more open-minded and realistic view of the facts
Iran Nuclear Deal a Product of Bush and Obama
Barack Obama wanted his current job bad enough to elbow Hillary Clinton aside to get it—and to run a nasty campaign against Mitt Romney to keep it—so I don’t feel sorry for him. Yet it’s clear that he thinks he’s presiding over a diminished franchise.
On Wednesday, the president came to the East Room to explain why he believes so fervently in his administration’s nuclear deal with Iran. Inquiring minds wanted to know: How can you trust a nation that bombs synagogues in other countries, sponsors terrorism in its own region, threatens to annihilate Israel, and imprisons American civilians for no reason at all?
Maybe we can’t, the president said. But the only alternative is war. It was slightly discordant: Obama was making a strong argument in favor of the proposition that America is weak. Similar dissonance was on display when CBS White House correspondent Major Garrett asked Obama why he was “content” to leave four Americans captive in Iran instead of making them part of the deal. Badly phrased, as Garrett later conceded, but a valid question. Obama flashed in anger, but his answer was that he hadn’t insisted on Iran’s freeing American hostages because he didn’t think he had the power to do so.
This passive streak was also in evidence when he was asked whether he’d revoke Bill Cosby’s presidential Medal of Freedom. Obama spoke forthrightly against rape, but prefaced his answer by saying: “There is no precedent for revoking a medal. We don’t have that mechanism.”
Watching that, I had a WWLBJD moment—wondering what Lyndon Johnson would do. Revoke the medal on the spot, maybe? The more instructive point is that it was George W. Bush who put that medal around Cosby’s neck in the first place. That’s the real sticking point with the Obama administration: what he was bequeathed by his predecessor.
In discussing Iran, Obama never said Tehran had promised to change its behavior. He acknowledged that Iran might use the economic windfall headed its way by increasing its nefarious activities. He hopes they won’t, but he offered no promises. He also tacitly conceded that Iran might cheat and lie and evade weapons inspectors. That’s not a problem, he insists, because if they do, the United States can simply reinstate economic sanctions on Iran.
That seems unlikely, given that four of the five nations that brokered this deal along with the United States—China, Russia, France, and Germany—covet their lost business opportunities in Iran, and would balk at bringing back sanctions. Thus did a process that began as a way of ensuring that Iran cannot develop nuclear weapons and export terrorism evolve into one that recognizes Iran as a regional power and tacitly accepts as inevitable that it will acquire nuclear arms someday—just not while Obama is president.
So who’s to blame for this?
One culprit is Obama’s world view. Multi-nationalism sounds good in theory, but in real life it means no one is accountable....
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