Friday, September 4, 2015

Roger Cohen, "Iran: The Obamacare of Foreign Policy": More Lunacy From the Man Who Claimed Iran Is Not Totalitarian



In his latest New York Times op-ed entitled "Iran: The Obamacare of Foreign Policy," Roger Cohen would have us know that Obama's unsigned nuclear deal with Iran has prevented a disaster:

"Why has a disaster been averted? Because if the deal had unraveled in Congress, so would America’s standing as a global power. Russia, China and the European Union would have concluded that the United States is unserious. To negotiate over years a tough compromise obliging Iran, among other measures, to slash its stockpile of enriched uranium by 98 percent and its operating centrifuges by two-thirds, and then walk away in a righteous and deluded funk — well, that’s not how America won the respect of the world."

However, as we were told earlier this week by Iranian Defense Minister Brigadier General Hossein Dehqan, "the time had come for the Americans to realize that they were not the world's super power and no one recognizes them as such any longer."

And as reportedly stated by Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Rybakov, who headed Russia's negotiating team:

"I was telling my associates last night that these Iranians are truly geniuses. They came to get a green light for their enrichment program from the Security Council in exchange for what? In exchange for their sanctions to be lifted. Not only do they not give anything in exchange, but they receive something in exchange for what they receive! Their sanctions will be lifted and their enrichment will continue."

America is now considered "serious" by the rest of the world? Road apples!

In his opinion piece, Cohen tells us of a conversation that he had with Nicholas Burns:

"The deal will become the 'Obamacare of foreign policy,' Nicholas Burns, a Harvard professor and former under secretary of state, told me. Yes, it will. That is, something sensible (at least in the eyes of most people across the world) to which Republicans will never acquiesce and which they will try to use in every conceivable way to undermine a president they loathe."

Needless to say, Cohen doesn't mention that Burns, in a recent Times op-ed, acknowledged:

"Republicans have been right to highlight the deal’s principal weakness — it could permit Iran to emerge stronger 10 to 15 years from now as restrictions on its nuclear program begin to lapse."

To overcome this "weakness," Burns, in his op-ed, recommended five measures, which surely should have been implemented prior to, and not after, agreeing to this illusory arrangement.

Sorry, but Obama's nuclear deal is indeed a disaster in the making, and Democrats will live to rue the day when Iran builds an arsenal of nuclear-tipped ICBMs capable of striking New York and Washington in the not too distant future.

1 comment:

  1. http://www.ijreview.com/2015/07/369205-iran-linked-500-deaths-us-service-members/

    [includes Senator Tom Cotton's excellent graphic, recently presented at Senate hearing, on how explosively formed penetrators, or EFPs, supplied by Iran, work. Who needs ICBMs? ]

    http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/09/iran-nuclear-deal-tehran-213114

    "If the Iran Deal’s So Good, Why Do the Iranians Love It?"

    "Since the nuclear pact was announced, the rhetoric inside Tehran has been ecstatic—and defiantly in favor of continuing Iran’s program."


    By Ray Takeyh

    09/03/15, 07:12 PM EDT


    "... The fact is that Iran required time to develop a state-of –art infrastructure and dispose of its antiquated devices. A deal that legalizes the program, shields it from retribution and grants it a reliable procurement channel for obtaining technologies from abroad is what Iran needed to construct an industrial nuclear network. Before the JCPOA, Iran was the custodian of an embryonic nuclear program that nearly all of the Western intelligence services were seeking to derail. All that is now gone.

    The expansion of Iran’s program is certainly on the mind of Ali Akbar Salehi, the head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization, who now contemplates a scientific cadre of 20,000 nuclear engineers working in multiple nuclear complexes. Among the technologies that Iran pledges to modernize is its primitive stock of IR-1 centrifuges that are a poor instruments for bombing making. Iran’s technicians have long eyed the more advanced IR-8 models that operate with much greater velocity and efficiency. As early as April, Abbas Araqchi, one of Iran s lead negotiators, stressed that Iran was not in a position to construct such machines given that their “research and development takes a long time and it will take 8 to 10 years to produce them in abundance.” And this is precisely the schedule that Iran negotiated for bringing them on-line. Once Iran has reliable cascades of IR-8s then it has a sneak out capability for it takes very few such devices housed in a small installation that may escape detection to enrich weapon-grade uranium. ..."

    [maybe Ray Takeyh needs better citations, but...
    NJ Senator Cory Booker - and VA's Warner and ND's Heitkamp - just pledged allegiance to #44.
    The Donald is working on the difference between Quds and Kurds. ]


    k

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