Obama's telling reaction to Iran's deception

Ralph Peters:

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Obama's statement amounted to, Ooooh, I'll huff, and I'll puff, and I'll blow your house down . . . maybe . . . eventually . . . but not really . . . let's talk . . .

Only Sarkozy made a serious attempt to get the Iranian leadership's attention, stressing the consistent failure of negotiations and the need for action. He understands that a decade of talking with Tehran brought zero results.

Obama cringed.

Shouldn't we be ashamed that a French president's leading the fight to protect Israel and the free world?

To be fair, Obama's overwhelmed.

Fatally confident of his powers of persuasion, he's bewildered that he hasn't been able to convince the Iranians (or the Palestinians, Russians, Venezuelans, Chinese, etc.) to do what he wants them to do.

So Washington delays. While Iran races toward a nuclear arsenal.

Not only has Iran's known program moved ahead despite our cajoling, now comes the news that far more dangerous facilities have been missed for years by our intelligence services (to their credit, though, they ultimately found the Qom installation). Who knows how many more we haven't found?

Additionally, an Iranian exile group opposed to the theocrat thugs in Tehran claimed this week that Ahmadinejad's government operates two secret plants that fabricate detonators for nuclear weapons.

One of those sites is in an east Tehran suburb, another in that enormous city's exurbs. The major enrichment site that embarrassed our president sits near Qom, Iran's holiest city.

Ahmadinejad's boys know what they're doing. They've dispersed their nuclear program across urban areas and deep underground. The network is not only hard to hit -- it's impossible to strike effectively without inflicting thousands of civilian casualties.

These new sites raise the stakes higher still: Attack the plant near Qom and we'll be seen by Shia Muslims as violating a holy city. Strike those Tehran detonator factories and you get severe collateral damage -- plus the probable spread of radioactive material, an instant "dirty bomb."

Yet, after all this, there's still resistance in Washington to the conclusions that Iran's determined to develop nuclear weapons and then use them. What amount of evidence will it take?

Iran's faith-crazed president appears before the UN, denying the Holocaust and damning Israel. He has openly and repeatedly professed an apocalyptic religious vision that requires chaos on earth to bring about the return of the "hidden imam," the Shia version of a messiah. He never misses an opportunity to call for Israel's total destruction.

And Washington insists he's joking. (Yeah, they're belly-laughing in Tel Aviv right now.)

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So now what? Obama will try more talks. We may see half-hearted sanctions -- which will be violated right and left. Russia, which profits hugely from dirty trade with Iran, can slip goods across the Caspian Sea or through Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan.

And maritime sanctions are meaningless, unless our president is willing to order our Navy to fire on Chinese-flagged or Venezuelan-flagged merchant vessels.

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Everything Obama has achieved in life has been through talking, but this is a situation where talk is not going to work. Only the use of force will stop these religious bigots and Obama lacks the will to use it. Israel has that will, but it lacks the capacity to do more than delay their efforts and stir a hornets nest which we would have to deal with. It would make more sense to put the forces in place that can deal with the problem on a comprehensive basis.