From today’s diary entry of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei:
Ah, the Americans. When it comes to our nuclear weapons program, they leave us with only good choices!
On the one hand, I can drag out the talks beyond this month’s latest deadline because the desperate Americans certainly will agree to keep talking. That’s how we went from the six-month interim deal in November 2013, through a deadline in July 2014, and then through another deadline in November 2014.
And why not? At every stage, the meek Barack Obama and the spineless John Kerry throw more concessions our way. They’ve already agreed to leave us many thousands of centrifuges with which to enrich uranium, to leave all our uranium and plutonium plants in place, to ignore our ballistic missiles program, and to lift all sanctions down the road. I’m tempted to see what else they’ll throw our way after this month.
Their desperation is really quite entertaining. For one thing, the Americans complain about our legal system, but they seem to be using theirs to silence one of their most powerfully placed critics on this issue – the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s ranking Democrat, Bob Menendez – by revealing that they plan to charge him with corruption. That’s kind of like when we charge our trouble-makers with “un-Islamic” activities.
For another thing, Obama and his team treat the leader of the Zionist state, which is supposedly America’s strongest ally in the region, with utter disdain when he tries to highlight what they prefer not to see. They seem to think we’ll appreciate the gesture, but they don’t realize that, in our part of the world, you don’t get points for abusing your friends; you get the contempt you so richly deserve.
Meanwhile, Obama sends National Security Advisor Susan Rice to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee conference to reassure the American Zionists; to quote Obama’s previous words (“Iran must not get a nuclear weapon. This is not a danger that can be contained … America will do what we must to prevent a nuclear-armed Iran”); and to declare, “President Obama said it. He meant it. And those are his orders to us all.” I guess the Americans don’t think Jews in America are as smart as Jews in the Zionist state.
On the other hand, I’m tempted to cut a deal with the Americans this month and be done with all this. I’ll take grief from the hard-line clerics and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, but here’s what I’d tell them:
After Obama and Kerry get their silly deal (and we all share our Nobel Peace Prize!), I suspect that we’ll be able to move to bomb-making with even less interference than we have at the moment.
Even now, with so much attention on our nuclear program, we’re not giving the International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors the access they want to our facilities. They don’t know what we’ve done on weaponization research, and we won’t tell them. If the Americans and their lackeys in Europe don’t care now, why would they care later when they’re basking in the glory of their deal (and Nobel)?
The Americans are very good at pretending to solve problems and looking away when the facts suggest otherwise.
That’s what they did in Russia, where they boast of “unity” with their lackeys, slapping Vladimir Putin with laughable sanctions that won’t stop him from re-taking more former Soviet territory and killing his biggest critics at home.
That’s what they did in Syria, where they told my good friend, Bashar Assad, to step down, threatened to bomb him for using chemical weapons, let Putin bail them out with a deal to ship the chemicals out of Syria, and looked away when Assad refused to relinquish all of them and later even used other chemicals.
That’s what they’ll do with us. If we cut a deal with them, the Americans will declare victory, pretend that they fulfilled their promise to prevent us from getting nuclear weapons, and look away when we kick the inspectors out. We’ll keep working on our ballistic missile program (and on the secret nuclear sites that no one’s discovered).
Meanwhile, the Americans and their lackeys will gradually lift the sanctions, investment will pour in from hungry Western capitalists, our economy will fully recover, our regime will be more secure at home, and we’ll be far better positioned to extend our revolution across the region.
At the moment, I can’t decide whether we should drag out the talks further or give the Americans their deal.
Either way, we can’t lose.
Lawrence J. Haas, former communications director for Vice President Al Gore, is a senior fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council.
http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/world-report/2015/03/10/inside-the-mind-of-irans-supreme-leader-ayatollah-ali-khamenei