Reckless, Ineffective & Naive
James Carroll says President Obama is going to put Iran into checkmate tomorrow:
On Thursday, when the United States confronts Iran over its hidden nuclear facility, one move will be as obvious as a jump in a game of checkers—the threat of tougher sanctions to force open the mountain bunker near Qum to international inspectors, combined with a demand for access to blueprints and personnel. The message will be clear: Tehran will not be allowed to weaponize its nuclear operations.
And later in that article:
The nuclear radicalism that animated Reagan, the abolitionist, plays in a lower key with Obama, but it defines the other move that he will make on Thursday. In effect, it is the carrot that will be quietly dangled before Iran: The U.S. is getting serious about nuclear disarmament.
While I’d dearly love to see Obama do a little shah mat number on Ahmadinejad, to me this looks like nonsense squared.
The sanctions threat is an empty one, unless Russia and China are on board. So far, no dice. Russia has made an empty gesture, nothing more. And China’s staying mum. For good reason, too — that oil China buys from Iran gets sold right back to Tehran as gasoline. Nifty.
And I fail to see how American disarmament is any kind of carrot. America’s conventional airpower alone could send Iran back into the Stone Age — or “make the rubble bounce,” as we used to say about nukes. Throw in a few US Army or Marine combat brigades, and it becomes obvious the US would never, ever need to risk the international catastrophe we’d cause by using nukes. All of this, Iran knows already.
So we have a combination of a limp stick and a moldy carrot. What’s that add up to?
Not much, I’m afraid.
Of course, I haven’t even mentioned that all of this daydreaming depends on Iran living up to its word. They’ve lied about their programs. They’ve lied about their intentions. They’ve lied about waging proxy and real war against this country for 30 years. But now they’ll negotiate in good faith, when they have the promise of nuclear toys to play with in just a few years?
So you’ll pardon my cynicism about The One’s apparent ability to dazzle our rivals in Tehran.
Stephen, this is James Carroll we are talking about. Have you ever read this whackdoodle? The Boston Globe has carried his column for years, and he is the strangest and most disturbed major paper columnist writing today.
The guy is obsessed with American guilt for developing and using nuclear weapons, blamed us for starting and continuing the Cold War, and simultaneously decries Israel and antisemitism. Anguish and moral preening are his specialties, while he excuses the worst immoralities of foreign regimes.
His point in this column is that Obama is setting up a genius move to use Iranian proliferation efforts as a lever to lead to full de-nuclearization… at least, of the US and its allies. So the bad regimes (which aren’t really bad, just forced to appear evil in order to protect themselves from the Great Satan) will thereby not be threatened, and the world can return to the safe, peaceful state it was in from 1914 to 1944, before nuclear weapons ruined everything. Which in CarrollWorld makes sense…
I have wondered why the Globe publishes him, some of his columns are beyond neurotic, filled with cultural self-loathing and depressiveness. There is a lot of that in the Massaholic culture, though, so he has survived all the layoffs as the Globe teeters on the edge of financial collapse.
“…to me this looks like nonsense squared.”
James Carroll is a former left-wing Catholic priest. He is also seems to be something of a committed pacifist who has daddy issues. His father was a high ranking military officer assigned to the Pentagon. Carroll almost always sounds like he is living in la-la land. He is definitely a member of the “blame America first” school of thought—just like Barack Obama. There is no sense taking him seriously.
Wish fulfillment on Carroll’s part, not that Obama won’t order sanctions — hell, he might even send a sternly worded letter to the Times for Ahmedinjad to read — but the idea that the sanctions are actually going to work, with China opposing them and Russia being lukewarm at best (and that’s assuming Obama actually got this from Putin for dropping the Eastern Europe missile shield).
The Iranians have Obama pegged, and he’s still not willing to take the hit to his own ego and admit the magnificence of Barack Obama just isn’t enough to make Iran change its ways, absent the fear of some sort of force. Any sanctions speech he gives will have as big an effect on Iran’s nuke program as his joint speech to Congress had on getting national health care passed.
He might put him into “Checkmate” and that is really “super peachy keen”, but we are not playing chess here kids, were playing “Doom” and you know what? Were all out of extra lives.
“Reckless, Ineffective & Naive”
Yeah, but he speaks well and looks great!
Interesting take Dan D. Obama lets Iran get nukes so that he can resolve the crisis by negotiating away ours.
That’s just crazy enought to be true!
The whole disarm arguement being tied to Iran and other proliferation nations is ridiculous. Iran isn’t concerned about US nukes. America has sufficient conventional superiority that the nukes are redundant. Iran is concerned about Israeli nukes, Indian nukes, and Pakistani nukes. Regional powers are pretty much always more concerned about their near-rivals. Which is also why arguements that we can “learn to live” with an Atomic Iran are so stupid. Can we deal with an Atomic Iran? Maybe, but an Atomic Iran leads to its near-rivals joining in: an Atomic Saudi, Atomic Egypt, Atomic Turkey. Just how many unstable to hostile regimes get nukes before it becomes a REAL problem?
He needs a foreign policy win. They know it.
Scratch that – he needs a win.
And again trying to used Reagan’s coattails.
When has sanctions ever worked? One example would be nice.
I am sure the floks in Iran, North Korea…..have palace walls covered in ‘Sternly worded UN letters outlining sactions’.
I hear they send them to Cuba for legal review.