NOBEL PEACE PRIZE UPDATE: The Middle East Couldn’t Possibly Get Worse. Could It? “We generally think of demonstrators as opponents of the government, but that isn’t necessarily true. (Occupy Wall St., for example, was basically an inept arm of the ruling Democratic Party.) Here, as in 1979, those who stormed the Saudi embassy were doing the Iranian government’s bidding. Note how the mob threw fire bombs at the Saudi embassy and ‘forced their way’ into the embassy, but then were ‘cleared by police.’ Likewise, they were allowed to start a fire that was then ‘swiftly extinguished.’ I am pretty sure that if Iran’s government wanted to protect the Saudi embassy, it could do so. . . . Of course, the United States is not responsible for everything that goes wrong in the world. The Middle East, in particular, is more than capable of bringing about disaster on its own. But it is hard to observe these events without wondering what Barack Obama was thinking when he decided to build Iran up as a regional hegemon, to seek an alliance with the mullahs, to release more than $100 billion in frozen assets to Iran’s government, to rescue Iran’s economy by procuring the end of sanctions, to bless and protect Iran’s ongoing nuclear program while posing no meaningful obstacle to the mullahs’ development of missiles capable of delivering nuclear weapons to the United States, as well as to Europe. I don’t know how to reconcile these policies with a good faith intention to pursue peace in the Middle East or to advance the national security interests of the United States.”