For those optimistic spirits out there, here's a Thursday morning cold-water-in-the-face snapshot of how Iran's Supreme Leader is tackling the marketing, right now, this hour, of the framework agreement his underlings entered into last week with the P5+1. Pleasant reading it's not, at least not if a person wants to feel that the whole peace-in-our-time thing is coming together.
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| Supreme Leader Ali Khamanei today, after the achievement of last week's Framework Agreement: "Americans (he tweets) always deceive & breach promises" |
The issues at stake are, of course, infinitely more complex than what can be shoe-horned into a string of Twitter tweets. But if this is the messaging that emanates from the highest authority in the land of Iran, the absolute Horse's Mouth, there has to be a basis here for reasonable, perceptive people to draw interim conclusions.
One of those might be, we think, that Iran is ready, willing and able to go to some lengths to humiliate the Americans. They did the same to Carter in the dying days of his presidency.
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| Supreme Iranian Leader last week [Image Source] |
Henry Kissinger has drawn some conclusions. His powerful analysis, co-authored with another former Secretary of State, ["The Iran Deal and Its Consequences", Wall Street Journal, April 7, 2015] is a masterpiece of taking apart the Obama/Kerry policies, compromises and about-faces that we have seen in the past year and especially the past few weeks, and describing in blunt terms the kind of mess we are now in. It ends with these words:
If the world is to be spared even worse turmoil, the U.S. must develop a strategic doctrine for the region. Stability requires an active American role. For Iran to be a valuable member of the international community, the prerequisite is that it accepts restraint on its ability to destabilize the Middle East and challenge the broader international order.
Until clarity on an American strategic political concept is reached, the projected nuclear agreement will reinforce, not resolve, the world’s challenges in the region. Rather than enabling American disengagement from the Middle East, the nuclear framework is more likely to necessitate deepening involvement there—on complex new terms. History will not do our work for us; it helps only those who seek to help themselves.
The ever-articulate David Horowitz has offered up some more-plainly-spoken analysis on the Times of Israel site [here] that we wish would get wider attention. The latest installment is entitled "The unfolding farce of Obama’s deal with Iran". In it, he refers to Iran's increasingly-brazen, publicly-announced measures that, as he correctly says, make a mockery of the entire treaty process:
Doubtless there is more of this travesty to come. That’s what you get when you allow a brutal, murderous regime to smell your hesitancy, your weakness, your neglect of your own and your allies’ essential interests. “This is our best bet by far to make sure Iran doesn’t get a nuclear weapon,” Obama asserted to The New York Times. Really, Mr. President? It doesn’t look like that from here. From here, it looks like you could have done a whole lot better. In fact, it looks like the very outcome you promised you’d avoid: A deal that lifts the economic pressure on an evil regime, and clears its route to the bomb. A bad deal. Far, far worse than no deal at all. [David Horowitz in Times of Israel, April 8, 2015]
If there's a verifiably optimistic dimension to this (not the self-deluding pap that seems to have much of America's news media in its grip), we're open to being shown where it is.
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