Obama wants Iran to have nukes

By Alan Caruba

The President's lack of attention and indifference to years of intelligence reports and analysis is leading to a potential horror in which Iran fulfills its quest to make its own nuclear weapons. It already has the missile capacity to deliver them throughout the Middle East and to Europe.

On October 6th Secretary of State John Kerry received a letter signed by 354 members of the House of Representatives that said in part "We are concerned that an agreement that accepts Iran's lack of transparency on this key issue (inspections) would set the dangerous precedent that certain facilities and aspects of Iran's nuclear program can be declared off limits by Tehran..."

Obama, however, is so intent on securing a deal with Iran – any kind of deal – that he has virtually ensured it will become the next nuclear power at the worst time in the worst place. This is the same President who thought he could reverse that hostility of the region to the U.S., blaming it on his predecessor's military interventions. He thought he could also ignore the most powerful element of the region, the hostilities between Sunnis and Shiites that have been around for 1400 years.

Throughout history there have been world leaders who have warned of a coming horror only to be ignored. Almost alone Winston Churchill warned of the Nazi regime's intentions and now Benjamin Netanyahu, prime minister of Israel, issued a comparable warning about Iran on September 29 at the United Nations. He spoke to a General Assembly gathering that many diplomats from Mid-Eastern nations shunned.

"Don't be fooled by Iran's manipulative charm offensive," said Netanyahu. "It's designed for one purpose and for one purpose only: to lift the sanctions and remove the obstacles to Iran's path to the bomb...once Iran produces atomic bombs, all the charm and smiles will suddenly disappear. They'll just vanish. It's then that the ayatollahs will show their true face and unleash their aggressive fanaticism on the entire world."

That is a definition of horror. Even throughout the long Cold War from 1945 until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, few believed that the Russians would use their nuclear weapons, nor the U.S. That cannot be said for Iran.

Netanyahu quoted from a book written by Iran's foreign minister Muhammad Javad Zarif who wrote "We have a fundamental problem with the West, and especially with America. This is because we are heirs to a global mission, which is tied to our raison d'etra...a global mission which is tied to our very reason of being." That mission is to impose Islam, the Shiite version, on the world. The use of terror to achieve this is natural to the world's leading sponsor of terror.

In November 2013, former Ambassador John Bolton, writing in The Weekly Standard, described the negotiations and the agreement as 'badly skewed from America's perspective. Iran retains its full capacity to enrich uranium, thus abandoning a decade of Western insistence and Security Council resolutions that Iran stop all uranium-enrichment activities." Noting Israel's likely military option if all else failed, Bolton said "Jerusalem fully understands that Israel was the real target of the Geneva negotiations."

A September 29 Wall Street Journal editorial, "Iran Makes the Rules," noted the Iranian President, Hasan Rouhani, "gave no ground on nuclear negotiations, whose latest deadline is late November" and that it is "harder to explain is why the Administration is now seeking ever more creative ways to give the mullahs what they want."

The editorial concluded saying "All this is happening while America's attention has been consumed by the rise of the Islamic State and Vladimir Putin's depredations in Europe. But permitting iran to get to the edge of nuclear capability would be the worst setback to U.S. and world security so far in the Obama era, which is saying something."

What is obvious to many observers of Obama is that he is immune to evidence and the advice based on it because he is convinced of his superior intellect and judgment. He has neither. The situation is so bad regarding his very late response to the Islamic State that his generals are openly saying that an air campaign is not going to hold them back and, indeed, as this is being written, they are knocking on the gates of Baghdad in Iraq and Kobani in Syria's north.

Israel has targeted Iranian nuclear facilities in the past by way of sending the regime a message. In May, the Iranian media reported an explosion at a facility in the northern city of Qazvin, not far from Tehran.

It is unlikely that most people in the West grasp the insanity of Iran's Islamic view of the world. Most certainly Obama gives no indication of that. In his recent speech to the UN General Assembly he said the conflict in the Middle East is "a fight no one is winning." He should read the newspapers or look at the TV news.

To grasp what drives the Iranian leadership, a quote from the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the leader of the 1979 revolution, is worth considering. "If one permits an infidel to continue in his role as the corrupter of the earth, the infidels moral suffering will be all the worse. If one kills the infidel and this stops him from perpetrating his misdeeds, his death will be a blessing to him."

So, nuclear missiles that destroy New York, Washington, D.C., and anywhere else where millions of infidels are found are a good thing if you're an Iranian leader.

Obama simply does not get this or refuses to do so. His failure puts us closer to a nuclear cataclysm with every passing day.

© Alan Caruba