Iran Bomb: At the Brink

Iran Bomb

“Whoever is not with [my enemy] is [with] me.”

--paraphrasing Jesus Christ (Matthew 12:30)

In short, “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

In a letter, 367 members of Congress (84%, including a majority of Democrats) have warned the president that lawmakers must be satisfied that any Iranian nuclear agreement must "foreclose any pathway to a bomb" before they lift sanctions against Tehran. But the White House has already told Congress their Iran rapprochement won’t require congressional approval.

At this point is there any doubt--as the Wall Street Journal’s Bret Stephens writes--about Barack Obama’s “upside-down” world view? Stephens, noting that the administration is now on better terms with Iran than it is with Israel, adds that the president

treats Republicans in the Senate as an enemy when it comes to the Iranian nuclear negotiations, while treating the Russian foreign ministry as a diplomatic partner. He favors the moral legitimacy of the United Nations Security Council to that of the U.S. Congress. He is facilitating Bashar Assad’s war on his own people by targeting ISIS so the Syrian dictator can train his fire on our ostensible allies in the Free Syrian Army.

He was prepared to embrace a Muslim Brother as president of Egypt but maintains an arm’s-length relationship with his popular pro-American successor. He has no problem keeping company with Al Sharpton and tagging an American police department as comprehensively racist but is nothing if not adamant that the words “Islamic” and “terrorism” must on no account ever be conjoined.

In light of these Topsy-turvy Obama policies and actions, Stephens’ advice to the Israeli government is:

Repay contempt with contempt. Obama plays to classic bully type. He is abusive and surly only toward those he feels are either too weak, or too polite, to hit back. . . The Israelis will need to chart their own path of resistance.

Comment: Obama has a consistent world view. Growing up as a minority half-black in Hawaii and Indonesia, Obama took comfort in the anti-colonial, anti-European wave of nationalism that swept through the mostly non-white world at the time. He rode that affirmative action tide through Columbia and Harvard Law to safe landing with his impressive black wife in mostly black South Side Chicago. Race remained his co-pilot as he rose through the Illinois State Senate and the U.S. Senate to the White House.

Don’t tell Obama the numbers are against him; he knows better. Israel is the past, much as Great Britain, Western Europe, and the Republican Party are the past. Time to align with a future that includes Iran, Obama’s own “Nixon goes to China” place in history.