Tag Archives: Israel

How to Tell When Barack Obama is Lying

Want to know how to tell when President Obama is lying?  These days, it’s easy:  His lips are moving.

Unfortunately, the president’s infamous lie as part of his sales pitch for Obamacare that “you can keep your doctor, period” is now clearly not the exception. It’s the rule.  The pattern is especially worrisome with respect to his practice of what amounts to serial national security fraud.

Consider, for example, the latest on the Iran nuclear weapons front. Mr. Obama insists that his interim deal “freezes” the mullahs’ nuclear program for six months.  He may be the only one who believes that whopper.  Certainly, the Iranian regime does not, and neither should we.

Yet, the President insisted at a Brookings Institution symposium on December 7th that, “There’s nothing in this agreement or document that grants Iran a right to enrich.” In fact, as the Iranians have noted, the United States and the other “Perm 5+1” members clearly accepted in two different places in the so-called interim accord that Iran would continue the enrichment of uranium.

Whether we call this arrangement an acknowledgment of an Iranian “right” or not is beside the point.  What matters is that the long lead-time item in Iran’s acquiring sufficient nuclear weapons-grade uranium has been legitimated by President Obama’s treacherous diplomacy.

The magnitude of the treachery being exhibited by a man who continues to profess that he will not let Iran get the bomb is evident in another comment made in the course of his remarks at Brookings. Mr. Obama floated for the first time the idea that the final agreement, that supposedly will be fashioned in the next six months, will allow Iran  to enrich uranium in perpetuity: “It is my strong belief that we can envision a end state that gives us an assurance that, even if they have some modest enrichment capability, it is so constrained and the inspections are so intrusive that they, as a practical matter, do not have [a] breakout capability.”

Forget about the weasel-wording caveats and the President’s empty platitudes about “the military option” remaining on the table. He has thus cleared the way for Iran to have a nuclear weapon, probably on his watch.  Just as his health care fraud is properly known as Obamacare, the fruit of the mullah’s nuclear weapons program he has just green-lighted should be known as Obamabomb.

It seems that the real purpose of the interim deal was less to “freeze” Iran’s burgeoning nuclear capability than it was to block the one military option that may actually remain viable: Israel’s.

There is no small irony to the fact that Mr. Obama chose as the venue for his latest lies about his commitment to the security of the Jewish State – which he described as “sacrosanct” – the Brookings event sponsored by an Israeli billionaire named Haim Saban.  In response to questions posed by Mr. Saban, the President insisted, for example, that: “Our support of Israel’s security has never been stronger….And that’s not just my opinion; I think that’s something that can be verified.”

Actually, it can be readily verified that no president has done more to jeopardize Israel’s security.  The bill of particulars may start, but does not end, with Obama’s clearing the way for the Iran to have the capability to act on its threats to “wipe Israel off the map.” Even before the interim deal, his administration had acted to impede, if not foreclose, Israeli options to prevent that existential danger. (For instance, it compromised, and thereby ended, a secret bilateral arrangement with Azerbaijan to provide post-strike recovery airfields for Israel’s jets.)

Insult was added to injury when the President lied to Israel’s Saban: “Prime Minister Netanyahu and I have had constant consultations on these issues throughout the last five years.” The truth is that Obama completely blindsided Netanyahu about his secret negotiations with Iran over the past year.

Throughout his presidency, Barack Obama has also bludgeoned Israel into making concessions to the Palestinians that would be perilous for the Jewish State. He declared that Israel must withdraw to earlier, indefensible boundaries correctly described as the “Auschwitz borders.” He has publicly demeaned and humiliated Prime Minister Netanyahu. And his Secretary of State, John Kerry, has encouraged European boycotts of Israel and “a third intifada” (or Palestinian terrorist war).

Most recently, Team Obama has let it be known that the United States would “impose” a solution on Israel next year if the Jewish State does not make the concessions necessary to satisfy the Palestinians. President Obama nonetheless lied to Mr. Saban: “What I’ve consistently said is that the only way this is going to be resolved is if the people of Israel and the Palestinian people make a determination that their futures and the futures of their children and grandchildren will be better off with peace than with conflict.”

The people of the United States, and the futures of their children and grandchildren, are being imperiled by a president whose disastrous national security policies are being exacerbated by his lies about them. These constitute high crimes, and should be treated as such by the Congress.

Imposing ‘Peace’ on Israel

Recent press reports say one of Barack Obama’s top goals for his second term is brokering a “peace” deal between the Israelis and Palestinians. But, if negotiations fail, he is said to be willing to impose his preferred outcome on the Israelis.

Until now, Republican and Democratic presidents alike have refused to foist a so-called peace agreement on Israel that was unacceptable to our most important Mideast ally.

What makes Obama’s approach so dangerous is that the concessions demanded of Israel would require her to surrender strategic real estate, with potentially suicidal results. It empowers Israel’s enemies, and ours.

The Obama gambit would reinforce the world’s perception that it is better to be America’s enemy than its friend. And that is a formula for inciting conflict – with more foes and fewer allies.

Obama’s friends are America’s foes

For nearly five years, this column has described the Obama Doctrine with nine words:  Embolden our enemies. Undermine our friends. Diminish our country.

Virtually everything President Obama has done since coming to office falls into one or more of those categories.  He promised to fundamentally transform America, and he is doing so with a vengeance by adhering to policies that conform to those nine words.

So imagine our surprise when Mr. Obama denounced his political opponents in Congress with the following words: “…Probably nothing has done more damage to America’s credibility in the world, our standing with other countries, than the spectacle that we’ve seen these past several weeks. It’s encouraged our enemies, it’s emboldened our competitors, and it’s depressed our friends, who look to us for steady leadership.”

Now, this is hardly the first time President Obama has tried to shift the blame for his myriad failures onto others.  But it is especially important in this instance that he not be allowed to get away with it because we have plenty of reason to believe that the predictable – and predicted – repercussions of the Obama Doctrine are about to come due, big time.  Worse yet, the associated costs are likely to be sufficiently high, in both blood and treasure, that Team Obama must not be permitted yet again to obscure or deflect its responsibility.

The truth is that Mr. Obama has throughout his presidency confused our enemies with America’s friends, and vice versa.  A case in point has been his strategically ominous transposing of the character and actual status two of the Eastern Mediterranean’s most strategically important states: Turkey and Israel.

Barack Obama has treated Turkey as a reliable partner even though, for the better part of a decade under its Islamist Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, this nation that is supposedly a NATO ally has been aligning ever more palpably with our adversaries.  Among the symptoms of this trend: the fomenting of rabid anti-Americanism by the Erdogan regime and its increasingly state-controlled media; Erdogan’s promoting of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Libya and Syria; and his assistance to Iranian efforts to circumvent U.S. and international sanctions.

By contrast, notwithstanding President Obama’s occasional gestures and rhetoric to the contrary, his administration has behaved towards Israel as though it were, at best, a country in which we have no interests.  At worst, Mr. Obama seems to consider the Jewish State as a hostile power.  He has: repeatedly demeaned its leader, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu; contributed to its international isolation (for example, by demanding at one point an end to settlement expansion as a precondition for the resumption of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations); and subverted its vital interests (notably, by declaring that Israel must withdraw to the indefensible pre-1967 borders).

Particularly reprehensible has been the Obama administration’s indifference to Turkey’s serial acts of aggression against Israel.  Notably, it effectively sided with the Turks when Erdogan sponsored an effort to violate the Israeli blockade of Hamastan in the Gaza Strip, a provocation that resulted in the loss of life of nine Turks.  In due course, Team Obama insisted that Prime Minister Netanyahu publicly apologize for the deaths of the provocateurs, then seemingly did nothing when Erdogan contemptuously dismissed Israel’s gesture.

Even more worrisome, Turkey reportedly recently compromised an Israeli spy-ring in Iran by blowing the cover of Iranian operatives who had met with their handlers on Turkish soil.  The disclosures have evidently led to the liquidation of at least some of those agents working behind enemy lines, and the loss of a precious human intelligence capability at a most sensitive time.  Now, more than ever, we need the ground truth about what is going on with respect to Iran’s nuclear weapons program, not just the disinformation being served up by the mullahs and their apologists.

The question occurs:  What else is the Turkish regime prepared to jeopardize to curry favor with America’s enemies at the expense of U.S. friends – or perhaps our own, even more immediate and direct security interests?  For example, thanks to its status as a putative NATO ally, Turkey has access to some classified U.S. intelligence and even our state-of-the-art F-35 stealth fighter jet.  Isn’t it realistic to expect that such sensitive items will be compromised, too?

We persist at our peril in ignoring the untrustworthy nature of Recep Erdogan’s agenda – to say nothing of abetting it by construing him, as President Obama does, as one his closest associates among foreign leaders.  Ditto Team Obama’s practice of subverting  our one, true ally in the region: Israel.  Should we not change course, you can bet we will have more enemies and fewer friends. And the blame for the mayhem that ensues will lie squarely with our Commander-in-Chief.

If President Obama is really worried about our diminished standing in the world and really wants to establish who’s responsible for it, he needs to look in the mirror.  And whether he chooses to do so or not, the rest of us had better make it much harder, not easier, for him to perpetrate this sort of reckless and dangerous national security fraud.  After all, with friends like Barack Obama’s, America neither needs nor can afford more enemies.

Mr. Netanyahu, Islam, Not Nazism, inspired Mufti of Jerusalem’s Jew-hatred

During his October 6, 2013 speech at Bar Ilan University, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu alluded to the ex-Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin el-Husseini. Mr. Netanyahu characterized el-Husseini as, “the undisputed leader of the Palestinian national movement in the first half of the 20th century.” The Prime Minister highlighted the ex-Muft’s role in fomenting pogroms (dating back, in fact, to the so-called “Nabi Musa” riots of  1920) during the decades between the Balfour Declaration, and the eventual creation of the State of Israel in 1948.

Netanyahu’s address also focused on el-Husseini’s World War II era collaboration with the Nazis, the clear implication being that the Mufti’s murderous, Jew-hating ideology was simply another manifestation of Nazi evil, transplanted to a local “nationalistic struggle” in the Middle East. I have just published an extensive analysis (available as a downloadable pdf  of 51 pp., and 120 references) entitled, “A Salient Example of Hajj Amin el-Husseini’s Canonical Islamic Jew-Hatred—Introduction, Text, and Commentary” which demonstrates that Netanyahu’s rehashing of such conventional, pseudo-academic “wisdom,” does not withstand any serious, objective scrutiny.

Click here to read the full post at AndrewBostom.org

Click here to download the extensive analysis in PDF format

The Israeli Golan

Last week, I was on the Golan Heights, a mountainous area where Israel and Syria meet.  In Israeli hands, this bitterly contested frontier has nonetheless for the past four decades been one of the world’s most quiet.

I could hear heavy weapons fire from Syria’s civil war in the distance, though.  And this week, some two hundred of Bashir Assad’s armored vehicles have been shooting at rebel forces so close to the border that two Israeli soldiers were injured yesterday.

The last time massed Syrian armor fired on the Golan was to launch the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Ever since it won, Israel has been told to return the Heights to Assad.  Had the Israelis foolishly done so, instead of a civil war in Syria, the next regional conflict might already have started.

An Anniversary to Remember – and Learn From

Jerusalem, Israel: Forty years ago this week, Arab armies launched the Yom Kippur War at a moment when practically every Israeli was preoccupied with religious obligations.  The Arab coalition very nearly succeeded in their longstanding goal of driving the Jews into the sea.

Such a peril arose principally because the Israelis failed to understand the enemies they were confronting at that moment – and their perception that the Jewish State was, if not weak, at least unready for a concerted, coordinated attack.  As has happened so often in the past, such a perception need not be right to precipitate war.  It just has to take hold in the minds of freedom’s foes.

Four decades later, we have much to learn from this experience.  Now, as then, the forces of the Free World are ignoring the nature and ambitions of the enemy arrayed against it.  And we are engaged in behavior that encourages the latter to behave aggressively towards us.

Seen from the vantage point of the Middle East, for example, there appears to be a widespread consensus:  What I think of as the Obama Doctrine – diminishing our country, emboldening our adversaries and undermining our friends – is sowing the seeds for escalating instability.  The result may once again be war.  Perhaps it will be a regional one.  Perhaps, as the Yom Kippur War threatened to do, it will spread beyond the Middle East.

While the recent raids by U.S. special operations units in Somalia and Libya are commendable – and indeed long overdue, like drone strikes targeting al Qaeda-linked individuals, these actions cannot begin to make up for the Obama administration’s failure to recognize that, far from being on the “path to defeat,” Osama bin Laden’s organization is continuing to metastasize.

This bit of national security fraud, which was perpetrated for nakedly political purposes in the course of the last presidential election, is greatly compounded by another: the proposition that al Qaeda and its franchises are the only jihadist danger we confront.  In fact, they are but subsets of a much larger threat posed by those who fully share Osama bin Laden’s supremacist agenda of imposing shariah worldwide.

Specifically, Team Obama persists in its efforts to embrace, legitimate, empower, fund and arm the wellspring of that Islamist threat: the Muslim Brotherhood. Even after the Egyptian military forced Brotherhood president Mohamed Morsi from power, rounded up the group’s leadership and, most recently, banned it outright, President Obama remains on the wrong side of history.

In Egypt, that may drive the new government into the arms of Russians. In Syria, Libya and Tunisia, it has us helping jihadists. And it contributes to a policy of weakening and otherwise isolating the one state in the region that stands as an actual counterweight to these forces: Israel.

The question occurs:  Why?

Clearly, President Obama is personally sympathetic to what he perceives as a “non-violent” Islamic group with whom we can do business, and he has surrounded himself with subordinates who share that view.  This ignores the fact that the federal government has proven in court that the Muslim Brotherhood’s mission in our own country is “eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within…by [our] hands.”

The Obama administration’s own clueless proclivities towards such enemies are being powerfully reinforced by Muslim Brotherhood-associated individuals now advising the President and U.S. national security agencies.  A free on-line course produced by the Center for Security Policy (www.MuslimBrotherhoodinAmerica.com) details the roles played by six such individuals.

One of them is Mohamed Elibiary, a Texas-based Islamist activist with a long-record of associations with and advocacy for the Muslim Brotherhood.  He was recently reappointed to the Department of Homeland Security’s Advisory Council and given the title of Senior Fellow there.

Yet, as Charles Johnson reported at the Daily Caller on 7 October, Elibiary makes no bones about his support for convicted terrorists and their funders.  Worse yet, an annotated series of interviews with Elibiary conducted by the Clarion Project’s Ryan Mauro published the same day by the Center for Security Policy establishes that Elibiary has used his advisory role to discourage the prosecution of his friends on material support for terrorism grounds. He has also played an instrumental role in the purging of official training materials of information about shariah and civilization jihad that our homeland defenders, law enforcement, intelligence community and military need to know to protect us.

A similar sort of wishful thinking and failure to calibrate the enemy nearly destroyed the Jewish State in October 1973.  The potential cost of our persisting in such a mistake today is as predictably high as it is avoidable.  But in order to avoid the bitter fruits of the Obama Doctrine, we have to understand our Islamist foes and, for starters, take a page from the new Egyptian government, by removing them and those who do their bidding from positions of influence and power in that of the United States of America.

Bibi at the UN

At the UN yesterday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu exposed the lies of the latest Iranian “charm offensive.” He warned of the grave danger that the nuclear weapons program it is designed to advance will pose to the Jewish State – and the world.

To the audience’s many Iran sympathizers and useful idiots, Mr. Netanyahu quipped that the former Iranian president, “was a wolf in wolf’s clothing” while the new one “is a wolf in sheep’s clothing, a wolf who thinks he can pull the wool over the eyes of the international community.”

He observed,  “It’s not that it’s hard to find evidence that Iran has a nuclear weapons program; it’s hard to find evidence that Iran doesn’t have a nuclear weapons program.” I’d add it’s national security fraud to pretend otherwise.

 

 

Abandoning Israel, Embracing Iran

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu meets today with President Obama who, last week, decided to negotiate with an Iranian regime committed to the destruction of the State of Israel.  What is more, the negotiations are predicated on a lie, namely that the mullahs in Tehran have no intention of acquiring nuclear weapons.

The Israeli leader will reportedly share detailed intelligence to the contrary.

But President Obama has as much as said “Don’t bother me with the facts.”  He actively dislikes Benjamin Netanyahu and his administration has had the most strained relations with the Jewish State of any since its founding in 1948.

The upshot is likely to be the further isolation of Israel at an exceedingly dangerous moment – one being made more so by our buying Iran’s nuclear lies.

Syria, Iran and the North Korean Model

Did US President Barack Obama score a great victory for the United States by concluding a deal with Russia on Syria’s chemical weapons or has he caused irreparable harm to the US’s reputation and international position? By what standard can we judge his actions when the results will only be known next year? To summarize where things now stand, last Saturday US Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov concluded an agreement regarding Syria’s chemical weapons arsenal. The agreement requires Syria to provide full details on the size and locations of all of its chemical weapons by this Saturday. It requires international inspectors to go to Syria beginning in November, and to destroy or remove Syria’s chemical weapons from the country by June 2014.

Obama and Kerry have trumpeted the agreement as a great accomplishment. They say it could never have been concluded had the US not threatened to carry out “unbelievably small” punitive military strikes against the Syrian regime in response to its use of Sarin gas to massacre 1,400 civilians in the suburbs of Damascus on August 21.

And then there is the perception of an “Iran dividend” from the US-Russian deal. Just two days after last Saturday’s agreement, speculation mounted about a possible breakthrough in the six party negotiations with Iran regarding its illicit nuclear weapons program.

According to Der Spiegel, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani may consider closing down Iran’s illicit uranium enrichment facility at Fordo under IAEA supervision in exchange for the removal or weakening of economic sanctions against Iran’s oil exports and its central bank.

The White House has not ruled out the possibility that Obama and Rouhani may meet at the UN General Assembly meeting later this month. These moves could pave the way for a reinstatement of full diplomatic relations between the US and Iran. Those relations were cut off after the regime-supported takeover of the US embassy in Teheran in 1979.

Obama’s supporters in the US media and Congress have hailed these developments as foreign policy victories for the United States. Thanks to Obama’s brilliant maneuvering, Syria has agreed to disarm from its chemical weapons without the US having had to fire a shot. The Iranians’ increased willingness to be forthcoming on their nuclear program is similarly a consequence of Obama’s tough and smart diplomacy regarding Syria, and his clever utilization of Russia as a long arm of US foreign policy.

For their part, critics have lined up to condemn Obama’s decision to cut a deal with Russia regarding Syria.

They warn that his actions in that regard have destroyed the credibility of his threat to use force to prevent Iran from developing or deploying nuclear weapons.

To determine which side is right in this debate, we need to look no further than North Korea.

In April 1992 the IAEA concluded that North Korea was hiding information on its nuclear program from the UN and declared it in breach of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty it signed in 1985. In March 1993 North Korea announced its intention to vacate its signature from the NPT. Later that year, it later offered to begin negotiations related to its illicit nuclear program with the US.

Those negotiations began in early 1994, after the US canceled planned joint military exercises with South Korea as a goodwill gesture to the North. The talks led to the Agreed-Framework Agreement concluded later that year under which North Korea agreed to shutter its nuclear installation at Yongbyon where it was suspected of developing plutonium based nuclear weapons. In exchange the US and its allies agreed to build light water nuclear reactors in North Korea, and to provide North Korea with oil for energy production until the reactors were up and running.

In November 2002 the North Koreans acknowledged that they were engaging in illicit uranium enrichment activities. In January 2003 Pyongyang announced it was withdrawing from the NPT.

In February 2005 it announced it possessed a nuclear arsenal. And on October 9, 2006, North Korea launched its first test of a nuclear bomb.

The US suspended its talks with North Korea in 2003. It responded to the nuclear test by renewing those negotiations just weeks after it took place. And in February 2007 the US and North Korea reached an agreement under which Pyongyang agreed to close down Yongbyon in exchange for a resumption of shipments of free oil.

In September 2007, against the strenuous opposition of then secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, who was the architect of the US’s renewed push to cut a deal with North Korea, Israel destroyed a North Korean built nuclear reactor almost identical to the Yongbyon nuclear reactor in the Syrian desert. Had it become operational, Syria would likely have developed a nuclear arsenal by now.

In June 2008, the North Koreans demolished Yongbyon’s cooling tower.

Amidst fears that North Korea had reopened the reactor in the fall of 2008, the US removed North Korea from the State Department’s list of state sponsors of terrorism.

Six months later, in April 2009, Pyongyang resumed its reprocessing of spent fuel rods for the production of plutonium. And the next month it conducted another nuclear test.

In 2010, North Korean scientists at Yongbyon told Siegfried Hecker, a former director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory that the plutonium reactor had been shuttered.

Later in 2010, the North Koreans began open enrichment of uranium at Yongbyon.

Enrichment activities have doubled in scale since 2010. US experts now assess that with 4,000 centrifuges operating, North Korea produces enough enriched uranium to build three uranium based nuclear bombs every year. On February 12, 2013 North Korea conducted a third nuclear test. Experts were unclear whether the tested bomb a plutoniumbased or uranium-based nuclear weapon.

On September 11, the media reported that the latest satellite imagery indicates the North Koreans have resumed their plutonium production activities at Yongbyon.

Although the media claim that this represents an abrogation of the 2007 deal, it is unclear why that deal was considered in place given that North Korea began its reprocessing activities in April 2009 and tested another nuclear weapon the next month.

Although it issued a strong statement condemning the reopening of the plutonium operation at Yongbyon, the Obama administration remains committed to the sixparty talks with North Korea.

When viewed as a model for general US-non-proliferation policy, rather than one specific to North Korea, the North Korean model involves a rogue state using the Chinese and Russians to block effective UN Security Council action against its illicit development and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

Faced with a dead end at the UN, the US is forced to decide between acting on its own to compel a cessation of the illicit behavior, or to try to cut a deal with the regime, either through bilateral or multilateral negotiations.

Not wishing to enter into an unwanted confrontation or suffer domestic and international condemnations of American unilateralism, the US opts for diplomacy. The decision is controversial in Washington. And to justify their decision, the champions of negotiating deals with rogue proliferators stake their personal reputations on the success of that policy.

In the case of Rice, her decision to open negotiations with North Korea following its nuclear test was staunchly opposed by vice president Dick Cheney. And once the policy was exposed as a failure first by the intelligence reports proving that North Korea was proliferating its nuclear technologies and know-how to Syria, and then with its early suspension of its agreement to the 2007 agreement, rather than acknowledge her mistake, she doubled down. And as a consequence, under the nose of the US, and with Washington pledged to a framework deal to which North Korea stood in continuous breach, North Korea carried out two more nuclear tests, massively expanded its uranium enrichment activities, and reinstated its plutonium production activities.

Just as importantly, once the US accepted the notion of talks with North Korea, it necessarily accepted the regime’s legitimacy. And as a consequence, both the Clinton and Bush administrations abandoned any thought of toppling the regime. Once Washington ensnared itself in negotiations that strengthened its enemy at America’s expense, it became the effective guarantor of the regime’s survival. After all, if the regime is credible enough to be trusted to keep its word, then it is legitimate no matter how many innocents it has enslaved and slaughtered.

With the US’s experience with North Korea clearly in mind, it is possible to assess US actions with regards to Syria and Iran. The first thing that becomes clear is that the Obama administration is implementing the North Korean model in its dealings with Syria and Iran.

With regards to Syria, there is no conceivable way to peacefully enforce the US Russian agreement on the ground. Technically it is almost impossible to safely dispose of chemical weapons under the best of circumstances.

Given that Syria is in the midst of a brutal civil war, the notion that it is possible for UN inspectors to remove or destroy the regime’s chemical weapons is patently absurd.

Moreover, since the agreement itself requires non-compliance complaints to be discussed first at the UN Security Council, and it is clear that Russia is willing to do anything to protect the Syrian regime, no action will be taken to punish non-compliance.

Finally, like his predecessors with regard to Pyongyang, Obama has effectively accepted the continued legitimacy of the regime of Bashar Assad, despite the fact that he is an acknowledged war criminal.

As was the case with Pyongyang and its nuclear brinkmanship and weapons tests, Assad won his legitimacy and removed the US threat to remove him from power by using weapons of mass destruction.

As for Iran, Rouhani’s talk of closing Fordo needs to be viewed against the precedents set at Yongbyon by the North Koreans. In other words, even if the installation is shuttered, there is every reason to believe that the shutdown will be temporary. On the other hand, just as North Korea remains off the State Department’s list of state sponsors of terrorism despite the fact that since its removal it carried out two more nuclear tests, it is hard to imagine that sanctions on Iran’s oil exports and central bank removed in exchange for an Iranian pledge to close Fordo, would be restored after Fordo is reopened.

Like North Korea, Iran will negotiate until it is ready to vacate its signature on the NPT and test its first nuclear weapon.

The critics are correct. And the danger posed by Obama’s decision to seek a false compromise rather than accept an unwanted confrontation following Syria’s use of chemical weapons will only be removed when the US recognizes the folly of seeking to wish away the dangers of weapons of mass destruction through negotiations. Those talks lead only to the diminishment of US power and the endangerment of US national security as more US enemies develop and deploy weapons of mass destruction with the sure knowledge that the US would rather negotiate fecklessly than contend responsibly with the dangers they pose.