Peace in Our Time

Caroline Glick writes:

President Barack Obama is an inept, incompetent leader. More than his failure to pass his domestic agenda on healthcare and global warming despite his Democratic Party's control over both houses of Congress, Iran's announcement on Thursday that it is a nuclear power and has the capacity to produce weapons-grade uranium is a testament to Obama's feckless incompetence. Even his most ardent supporters are admitting this.

Take the New York Times. In a news analysis Thursday of Obama's failure to prevent Iran from advancing with its nuclear program, David Sanger wrote that for Obama, the last year has been "a year in which little in his dealings with Iran has gone the way that the White House expected."

Since Obama first announced his wish to sit down with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at a Democratic presidential candidates' debate in the spring of 2008, the 44th US President's only strategy for dealing with Iran has been to appease its leaders. And as of Tuesday, he still believes that ingratiating himself with the regime is his best bet.

On Tuesday Obama wouldn't admit that appeasement has failed even as all of Iran's top leaders said they were expanding their illicit uranium enrichment activities. The most he would do was acknowledge that the regime's leaders "have made their choice so far, although the door is still open."

As for sanctions, well, Obama said it will take "several weeks" to put those together at the UN.

The distressing truth is that Obama's aim has never been to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon. His whole "sanctions-if-engagement-fails" strategy is just a ruse. The Obama administration has never intended to place sanctions on Iran. As one senior administration official told the New York Times, the purpose of the sanctions talk is to get the Iranians to agree to negotiate. As he put it, "This is about driving them back to negotiations, because the real goal here is to avoid war."...

Hey, it worked for that British bloke, right?