Wolf Howling: Netenyahu To Speak As Obama and The Mad Mullahs Slouch Towards Bethleham

Sunday, March 1, 2015

Netenyahu To Speak As Obama and The Mad Mullahs Slouch Towards Bethleham

Barack Obama intends the centerpiece of his foreign policy legacy to be a de facto alliance with Iran–a stroke so brilliant that only he could think of it. The U.S. will set Iran up as the dominant regional power in the Middle East, in part by allowing it to develop the nuclear capability for which its rulers have long yearned, and in exchange, Iran will keep the peace and subdue troublesome upstarts like ISIS. To someone who grew up thinking that the call to prayer from a minaret is one of the most beautiful sounds on Earth, this might make some kind of sense. To those of us forced to live in the real world, it is bonkers.

John Hinderaker, Powerline, The Mullahs: Still Crazy After All These Years

The left has continuously and catastophicly misjudged Iran's theocracy since 1979, when Jimmy Carter made Iran's theorcratic revolution possible. Carter wholly misunderstood the ideology and threat of Ayatollah Khomeini, allowing him back into Iran to take over the revolution under the belief that Khomeini was rational and could be swayed by American economic benefits. We are still paying for Carter's catastophic naivety today, as Iran remains the single most destabilizing influence, not just in the Middle East, but the world. You can read the roll-up of Iran's actions here. Since I wrote that in 2008, little has changed other than Iran's machinations are starting to pay off. The theocracy is playing an ever-more dominant role in Iraq, and the Shia rebels they were backing in Yemen have forced that country's leadership to flee. The rebels now control the capital.

Now things portend to get much worse. Obama too misjudges Iran, seeing them as a ratonal actor that can be a "partner for peace" in the Middle East and that can be entrusted with nuclear weapons. To call Obama's plans "bonkers," as John Hinderaker does in the quote at the top of this post, is to understate the existential danger of Obama's plan by an infinite order of magnitude. While Israel of course sees this Obama madness as the greatest of dangers, it is certainly not just Israel in the Iranian sites. If anyone in this country does not see the same existential danger to America and Western civilization as a whole, they are suicidally delusional. Yet if nothing is done to derail this insanity, the Obama deal, a deal of Chamberlainesque proportions, will be done.

Enter PM Bibi Netanyahu, who will speak to Congress this week. Obama is pulling out all the stops to delegitimize Netanyahu and his speech, for it really is only the Israeli PM and his ability to sway American public opinion that can stop Obama's suicidal march. As Caroline Glick writes:

Netanyahu is not coming to Washington next Tuesday to warn Congress against Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, because he seeks a fight with Obama. Netanyahu has devoted the last six years to avoiding a fight with Obama, often at great cost to Israel’s national security and to his own political position.

Netanyahu is coming to Washington next week because Obama has left him no choice. And all decent people of good will should support him, and those who do not, and those who are silent, should be called out for their treachery and cowardice.

Treachery and cowardice indeed. Unfortunately, such people rarely pay the price their acts so justly deserve. As it is, Obama and the entire left, whose hands are bloodied from throwing away our victory in Iraq for the benefit of their domestic political narrative, will pay no price except perhaps in the history books, assuming our nation survives to write them.

I'll shift gears here and close this post with the single most prophetic and troubling poem ever written. It's by William Butler Yeats, who penned it in 1921, in the wake of the horrific destruction wrought in World War I. And when one thinks of the world today, it is far too easy to think that it could have been penned to describe our reality.

The Second Coming
by William Butler Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?