Tentative theses on Obama and Iran

If any sentient person had serious doubt, last week’s news that Iran has a covert uranium enrichment facility under construction at a military base outside Qom should serve to clarify Iran’s intent to obtain nuclear weapons. News that Obama had been briefed on the existence of this facility during the transition makes it difficult to understand what Obama has said and done about Iran since then. His statements and actions need to be reconsidered in light of the state of his knowledge. In the spirit of inquiry I offer the following premises and tentative theses:
1. In statements going back to the primary campaign, Obama repeatedly referred to Iran’s prospective acquisition of nuclear weapons as unacceptable and stated that no option to prevent it should be taken off the table. Yet Obama accepts the legitimacy of Iran’s nuclear program and will do nothing to retard it.
2. Obama has known about the second Iranian enrichment facility since the transition.
3. Obama has repeatedly demonstrated an eagerness to avoid confrontation with the Iranian regime — to the point of fawning over the regime. He prides himself on accepting the legitimacy of the Iranian regime.
4. Obama made nuclear disarmament the theme of his speech before the UN Security Council last week and secured the passage of a related resolution. Although Obama called for “full compliance with Security Council resolutions on Iran and North Korea,” he emphasized that the resolution (which named no country) was “not about singling out individual nations.”
5. The U.S.-drafted resolution called for “further efforts in the sphere of nuclear disarmament” to achieve “a world without nuclear weapons” and urged all countries that have not signed the 1970 nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to do so. What countries might he have in mind?
6. Obama needs political cover for doing nothing about Iran’s nuclear weapons program and its imminent success.
7. Obama’s statements and actions indicate antipathy to Israel and its security interests.
8. Obama can propose mutual nuclear disarmament to Iran and Israel.
9. Such a proposal would appear to be evenhanded.
10. When the Israelis refuse to give up their nuclear weapons, he can throw up his hands and blame the Israelis for the Iranian program.
11. It will not work, but Obama is the sort to think that it will, for he believes he has come to save the world.
12. Our enemies have come to take Obama for a fool. (So have our friends.) Conscious of his divinity, he does not understand that they take him for a fool, or that he has only confirmed them in their estimate of him.
For a good article that tends to undercut some of my tentative theses, I commend Stephen Hayes’s “Obama’s Iran formula.”

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