To see how confused and even absurd the Democratic approach has been to Iran, consider the case of Korea
offers the New Republic's
Martin Peretz (via
Instapundit).
Does anyone think that if Obama withdrew the 30,000-odd U.S. troops
in South Korea that he would “end the war”? On Obama’s logic, we should
be exiting our troops immediately and freeing up hundreds of billions of
dollars of funds over the next decade for North Korea, while enabling a
sponsor like China to sell them conventional arms and ballistic missile
technology. Then we can sit back and “hope” that North Korea will
“change.”
Two decades ago, the North Koreans challenged the administration of
our last Democratic president in the same way as Iran challenges our
current one. Who can forget The New York Times’s editorial judgment
in 1993 that “President Clinton is adopting a sound diplomatic strategy
for coaxing North Korea to give up its nuclear ambitions” by “rightly
resisting pressure to get tough with Pyongyang”? This month, one day
after the Ayatollah said emphatically the deal will not change his
country’s attitude toward the U.S., the Times asserts
that President Obama “was right to keep the focus on restraining” the
Iran nuclear program, but that if the sanctions are not lifted quickly
enough, the so-called Iranian “moderates” could be discredited,
“boosting the hard-liners.” Cognitive dissonance seems to be the
official editorial policy of the Democratic elite.
The obvious point is that the nature of the Iranian regime matters,
just as the nature of the North Korean regime matters. While our leaders
take a holiday from history, the bad actors of the world do not take
much of a vacation. American voters know this, which is likely why Obama
did not disclose his detailed intentions regarding Iran in his 2012
re-election campaign. But now many Democrats complain that supporting
the deal is their only choice. Moreover, the president, this time
through the agency of his UN ambassador, the putative idealist Samantha
Power, has laid a procedural trap for the wavering Democrats by
introducing the big power treaty to the Security Council where it has
already passed. This will make congressional review doubly difficult,
and more than doubly important. In any case, the compact deserves
negation on its own terms. But, as it happens, the Ayatollah who truly
runs Iran declared on the morrow of the announcement of the agreement
his intention to wage war. On Israel, no surprise. And on us, the U.S.,
the very architect of this peace.
