Obama’s gross miscalculation on Iran — that the mullahs could be cajoled out of their nuclear ambitions — and his failure to come up with a timely, viable plan for depriving the regime of nukes have had two tragic consequences. First, we are either on the brink of a nuclear-armed Revolutionary Islamic state or of war, carried out, most likely, by a tiny country (while the U.S. frets about “destabilizing” the region) to prevent the unimaginable from occurring. And second, we have, in a futile effort to ingratiate ourselves with a despotic reign of terror — as brutal as any on the planet — abandoned the people of Iran.

A heart-wrenching example of the latter is spelled out by Michael Weiss. He explains the fate of Shiva Nazar Ahari, an activist for democracy and human rights, who has been in and out of (mostly in) the Iranian hell-hole, Evin prison, since June of 2009. Looking at her lovely picture, one can’t help wondering what her present health and appearance must be. She has, as Weiss describes, endured the wrath of her jailers:

In 2006, after she became the spokeswoman for the Committee of Human Rights Reporters (CHRR), Ahari was kicked out of university, whereupon her troubles really began.

She was re-arrested in June 2009 and sent to Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison, where she spent 33 days in solitary confinement. The cells are so small that a short person can’t even stretch her arms or legs. One informed observer has described them to me as “human coffins.” Despite being verbally threatened by Saeed Mortazavi, Tehran’s prosecutor general, who told her she’d be murdered if she didn’t stop working on human rights campaigns in Iran, Ahari persevered. She was released in September 2009 on $200,000 bail and promptly resumed her defense of political prisoners. …

In December of last year, Ahari was arrested yet again, along with two other activists, while en route to the funeral of Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, a man considered to be the clerical inspiration behind much of the Green Revolution. Ahari went on hunger strike for two days, then fell ill and was taken to Evin’s prison hospital.

And so it is for her and many other Iranians. She now stands accused of “anti-regime propaganda” and “acts against the state.” But that is not the worst of it: “the most serious charge against Ahari is ‘mohareb’ (rebellion against God), which carries with it the death penalty.”

Where is the Obama administration, for God’s sake? They have been mute. Averting their eyes. They long ago gave up on the Green Revolution and cast their lot with Ahari’s inquisitors, banking on our ability to do business with them. To make an issue out of Ahari, to label and ostracize the Iranian dictatorship in the international community as a genocidal regime and human-rights abuser, to be a clarion voice for freedom — these are not only beyond the ability of this president, but beyond his imagination.

Obama missed the window of time to both forestall a nuclear-armed, jihadist state and to help uproot an evil regime. The world and the Iranian people will pay a heavy price for it.

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