Trusting Iran is an absurd wager
President Obama is staking not just his reputation but the future of his world on the premise that Iran has some valid reason not to pursue nuclear weapons.
We appreciate the president’s willingness to gamble with his reputation. All successful officeholders must do so to some extent, but we are less inclined to applaud him for betting the security of the free world on trusting a regime whose No. 1 foreign policy objective is to obliterate Israel and which came into power on a chant of “Death to America.”
Secretary of State John Kerry has been scrambling to complete negotiations with Iran over a deal that would putatively prevent the Iranians from pursuing nuclear weapons, but would actually — at most — just delay them for 10 years.
Kerry said, “No one has presented a more viable, lasting alternative for how you actually prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon.”
We beg to differ. A much more lasting alternative would have been to allow Israeli jets to bomb the many nuclear facilities in Iran anytime in the past decade. A less attractive, but still viable, alternative would have been to do so ourselves.
In 2004, then-Sen. Barack Obama had this to say: “Launching some missile strikes into Iran is not the optimal position for us to be in. On the other hand, having a radical Muslim theocracy in possession of nuclear weapons is worse.”
That last sentence sums up the problem. And when Kerry was running for president in 2004, he envisioned a different solution than negotiation with a country that funds terrorism throughout the Middle East:
“The president always has the right and always has had the right for pre-emptive strike,” Kerry said then. No wonder. The Democratic platform that year included this plank: “A nuclear-armed Iran is an unacceptable risk to us and our allies.”
How much more true for Israel, a nation of 8 million (including 6 million Jews) challenged by an Iranian population of 78 million, surrounded by an Arab region of 422 million people, and dwarfed by a world Muslim population of nearly 2 billion.
No wonder Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in his remarkable address to Congress on Tuesday, worried that a nuclear deal with Iran will threaten the very survival of his country. He spelled out plainly the role of Iran in movements of violence and oppression throughout the region, and showed with simple, straightforward, chilling accuracy why Sen. Obama of 2004 was right and President Obama of 2015 is dead wrong.
Netanyahu was right when he said that “we don’t have to bet the security of the world on the hope that Iran will change for the better” and that “we don’t have to gamble with our future and our children’s future.”
It seems unlikely that President Obama or Secretary Kerry will get the message. It’s questionable whether they were even listening, but we hope the American people were — because the Iranian problem is not going away through negotiations in Montreux anymore than the Nazi problem went away through negotiations in Munich.