Obama's Failed Iran Policy & The Need To Set A Red Line

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in a dramatic speech to the United Nations, employed a simple diagram to hammer home his plea that the international community set a "clear red line" over Iran's nuclear program -- warning that a nuclear-armed Iran would be tantamount to a nuclear-armed Al Qaeda.

Netanyahu: 'Clear red line' needed to stop Iran's nuclear program, Fox News, 27 Sep. 2012

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. . . But what Obama hasn't done is effectively address the single greatest overarching foreign policy issue facing the U.S. since day one of his Administration - the continued viability of Iran's theocracy and that theocracy's drive for a nuclear weapon. This is a regime every bit as dipped in blood as that of Pol Pot's and, as they draw ever closer to having a nuclear arsenal, every bit as threatening to the world as that of Hitler. To repeat the assessment of Iran by then Defense Secretatry Robert Gates in 2008:

Everywhere you turn, it is the policy of Iran to foment instability and chaos, no matter the strategic value or cost in the blood of innocents - Christians, Jews and Muslims alike. . . . There can be little doubt that their destabilizing foreign policies are a threat to the interests of the United States, to the interests of every country in the Middle East, and to the interests of all countries within the range of the ballistic missiles Iran is developing.

Iran, Nukes & Obama's Scales, 5 Dec. 2011

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On the day Obama was inagurated into office, stopping Iran's drive towards a nuclear arsenal was by far his most important foreign policy challenge. Yet here we sit, four years later, with Iran's centrifuges spinning ever faster. As Mitt Romney noted this past week

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U.S. President Barack Obama's policy on Iran represents his single worst foreign policy failure, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney said in an interview on Sunday, saying that Iran was closer to having "nuclear capability" than when Obama took office in 2008.

Obama's response - "If Gov. Romney is suggesting that we should start another war, he should say so." Clement Attlee couldn't have said it better.



Without doubt the most important lesson of WWII is that the delay of Attlee and his French counterpart in standing up to Hitler - to draw a red line if you will - ended up embroiling the world in the costliest and deadliest war in the history of man. It wasn't the beligirence of the French and British that led to WWII, it was their desire for peace at all costs, and thus their refusal to threaten force against Nazi Germany all the way up until the date Germany attacked Poland in September, 1939. According to a post-war debriefing of Nazi generals, WWII could been avoided had Britain and France stood up to Hitler in 1936-37, before Hitler's war machine was built up in strength.

Today, Obama claims, for domestic consumption, that the use of force is on the table as an option against Iran. But he is trying to have it both ways, criticizing Romney for even wanting to threaten Iran with force, while to Iran, he is silent.

Israeli PM Netanyahu has been publicly begging Obama to make a credible threat for the use of force against Iran for months as Iran moves ever closer to a nuclear arsenal. At the UN yesterday, Netanyahu gave a crystal clear warning to the world of the threat Iran poses and repeated his plea to Obama to act decisively with a threat of force before it is too late. Do watch this whole speech. It is worth a half hour of your time:



Do note that not only has Obama refused to meet with Netanyahu this past week, our U.N. Ambassador, Susan Rice, did not attend Netanyahu's speech at the UN. She wsa off having lunch with Hillary.

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