Tom Wilson in an article for Commentary entitled, Clapper: Iran Ready for Nuclear Breakout, points out that immediately after Barack Obama's State of the Union Address, in which he patted himself on the back for allegedly halting the progress of Iran's nuclear program, Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, claimed otherwise in his annual report on the worldwide threat assessment.
As Wilson writes:
Clapper stated that "these technical advancements strengthen our assessment that Iran has the scientific, technical, and industrial capacity to eventually produce nuclear weapons. This makes the central issue its political will to do so."So under the Obama administration, after assuring the world that he would prevent a nuclear-weaponized Iran, the administration now admits that it is really up to the Iranians whether or not they build what I have been calling a "Sharia Bomb." Barack Obama just went on international television and told the American people, and America's allies, that diplomacy is proving successful and now, within twenty-four hours of that message, we are told by his own Director of National Intelligence that what stands between us and an Iranian bomb is nothing more than the political will of the Iranian government.
Gee, I feel comforted.
What is perhaps most disheartening about this report is that because of the emphasis that it puts on the need to be able to monitor closely whether Iran is taking the final steps toward breakout, Clapper counsels that further sanctions would be counterproductive. In other words, the argument now seems to be that the U.S. must avoid imposing further sanctions, lest it disrupt the Iranians' willingness to allow inspectors to monitor their ongoing and undismantled nuclear enrichment program. This sits in rather sharp contrast to the six United Nations Security Council resolutions calling for a total halt to Iran's uranium enrichment.I have been arguing for years now that all indications suggest that the Obama Administration has no genuine will to prevent Iran from gaining nuclear weapons and, according to the U.S. Director of National Intelligence, I was right all along. Of course, I was hardly alone. Millions of people throughout the world, including most particularly the Iranians, understood that Obama is not good to his word. Those of us with something less than sycophantic tendencies very much suspected that the Obama administration would do next to nothing about the coming Iranian bomb because it is not in Obama's ideological DNA to stand strong before American enemies.
The inclination is not difficult to understand. Obama grew up within the shadow of the Vietnam War and is therefore skeptical - not unreasonably so - of the imposition of American might onto foreign peoples - other than the Jews of Israel, for reasons that polite company refuses to discuss.
And, of course, following the Cowboy President, and seeming to be the antithesis of Bush II and his nefarious overlord, Darth Cheney, Obama sought an alternative foreign policy grounded more in compromise than in swinging cajones. The problem is that the liberal tendency toward compromise can sometimes erode into little more than weakness and I do believe that this is what we are seeing with this administration.
People often assign negative intention to Obama. I do not believe it for one moment. Barack Obama is not seeking to undermine American well-being, nor Israeli well-being. The problem is not his intentions, it is his commitment to an ideology and a political movement that has brought him great wealth, power, and prestige. Unfortunately that same political movement is incapable of standing up for its own alleged values due to specific contradictions within the ideology itself.
Barack Obama represents the American left; not the hard-left, not the crazy left, but the moderate, reasonable left. That is precisely why I voted for him in 2012. But if even the moderate left in the United States has lost its will to stand up for the national interests of the American people, then what good is it? If Barack Obama and the Democratic Party and the larger progressive movement are OK with an Iranian bomb then they have pissed away any instincts that they may have had in the past toward American national security.
An Iranian bomb will set-off an arms race throughout the Middle East with both Egypt and Saudi Arabia scrambling to develop their own nuclear weapon capabilities. This will exacerbate the ongoing bloody tensions between Sunni, Shia, theocrats, and semi-secular autocrats as they fight it out in Syria where, already, hundreds of thousands of people have been slaughtered and G-d Only Knows how many people displaced and homeless. Furthermore, an Iranian bomb will demonstrate to the people throughout the Arab-Muslim Middle East that the Islamists represent the "strong horse" and that theocracy is the way to go.
It will represent a great victory for the most hard-line, right-wing retrograde fascistic religious political movement in the world today and, ironically, it will be a victory handed to it by a left-wing American president whose base tells the world that it opposes such things.
How do you like them apples?
