Charles Krauthammer refuses to fall for Obama’s game of misdirection. He writes this about the recently concluded nuclear summit:
So what was the major breakthrough announced by Obama at the end of the two-day conference? That Ukraine, Chile, Mexico and Canada will be getting rid of various amounts of enriched uranium. What a relief. I don’t know about you, but I lie awake nights worrying about Canadian uranium. I know these people. I grew up there. You have no idea what they’re capable of doing.
As Krauthammer notes, it’s a good but minor thing to secure nuclear material in such a fashion, unworthy of all the hoopla — unless you’re trying to distract attention from the lack of serious focus on the real threats of nuclear proliferation — Iran and Pakistan, for example. While the 47 countries met, one moved ahead with its plans:
All this during a week when top U.S. military officials told Congress that Iran is about a year away from acquiring the fissile material to make a nuclear bomb. Then, only a very few years until weaponization. At which point the world changes irrevocably: The regional Arab states go nuclear, the Non-Proliferation Treaty dies, the threat of nuclear transfer to terror groups grows astronomically.
Obama chose to concentrate on one of the consequences of a nuclear-armed Iran — the transfer to terror groups. This, we can surmise, is another hint (sanctions are “no magic wand” is another) that the Obami are already working on their explanations and excuses when the “unacceptable” becomes reality. They will pronounce that, really, the threat from Iran is not, in and of itself, catastrophic, and a new diplomatic effort will be underway to secure Iran’s agreement not to disseminate their nuclear prize. Yes, it’s just the sort of thing they would manage to say with straight faces.
As with so many of Obama’s foreign policy feints and gambits, one is left wondering: what next? Surely they realize now that the chance of the itty-bitty sanctions working to deter the mullahs is minimal. And they certainly have decided not to invest any hope in the Green Movement. So what do they do in a year when the Iranians announce “we have the bomb”? The policy question is daunting enough, for “containing” Iran after they have a nuclear weapon will be more problematic than before, and we’ve done a poor job of that (e.g., failing to respond to the deaths of Americans in Iraq resulting from Iran’s handiwork). But the political fallout will be devastating. The Left will deplore the entire collapse of the NPT, and most everyone else will be in an uproar over the egregious national security failure.
It’s a mystery, really, how the Obami think this will all turn out. They’ve eliminated the most logical avenues for thwarting Iran’s nuclear program (military action, crippling sanctions, and regime change), and they’re doing everything they can to restrain Israel from taking up the slack. Maybe in all the misdirection, they’ve spun themselves and lost track of the legal danger — to the country and to their political standing — that a nuclear-armed Iran poses. They, then, are in for quite a shock when reality overtakes them.
