Barack Obama’s incredible risks on world security
In an all-out effort to be remembered in history as the president who made a deal with the Islamic terrorist state of Iran, Barack Obama is risking more than just his legacy.
At stake are the lives of people throughout the world.
In the process he may just be remembered as the guy who ignored history, and instead of being the one who prevented Iran from carrying out their promise to annihilate Israel and the rest of the “infidels” of the world, became the one who most resembled Neville Chamberlain.
If you don’t know who that is, look him up. A short description goes like this: the clueless British prime minister who in 1938 signed a deal with Adolf Hitler he thought might halt Nazi Germany’s takeover of most of Europe.
He foolishly declared “peace for our time,” as if believing a crazed maniac with designs on world domination could be trusted.
That’s where we are with this agreement to free up $150 billion for Iran in exchange for a promise not to develop a nuclear weapon. At least not right away.
The agreement also ends the embargo on other weapons development and leaves intact Iran’s nuclear infrastructure.
News media across the world have been trying to explain all the agreement contains (except for the secret side deals we haven’t seen), how it will be enforced and the results it is likely to produce.
It’s complicated, so you get a wide variety of conclusions. But that really doesn’t matter, because there is only one fundamental question that overshadows it all.
Can the fanatical religious and military leaders of the only nation on Earth committed to the eradication of another country and its people be trusted?
Again we can look to history for the answer.
Front and center is the threat to Israel. But it goes way beyond the Jews.
Already at war with America for decades and responsible for more than a thousand deaths of Americans in Iraq, Afghanistan and Lebanon, can Iran now be expected to end all of that?
Obama has declared we can just ignore the rising calls for “death to America” that are chanted in public demonstrations all the time. He says that’s just noise.
The Islamic Republic of Iran hates the West and its freedoms. Iran seeks to dominate the Middle East and the entire Muslim world.
The $150 billion this agreement frees up by releasing sanctions will go a long way toward helping it achieve that goal.
Obama says no better deal can be reached. It’s this or war.
Our Congress has an opportunity to provide a different answer when it returns from the August recess.
The remedy could be to reject the deal, tighten sanctions, impose more restrictions and enforce them all with the fearsome supremacy of the world’s only superpower.
If any country in the world in 1938 could have delivered on such a threat, Hitler’s Third Reich would have been snuffed out and there would have been no second world war.
Diplomacy fails when any party to negotiations has no intentions of complying with terms they may have agreed to in the process of reaching a conclusion that buys the time they need to carry out their original objectives.
That’s what Hitler did. What’s happening now with Iran has every appearance of following the very same course.
But Iran can only succeed if this deal is finalized.
If it is, then the election of our next president would become the most important decision our nation has faced in the lifetimes of every single one of us and for generations to come.
Richard Greene is a former Arlington mayor and served as an appointee of President George W. Bush as regional administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency.
This story was originally published August 14, 2015 at 6:46 PM with the headline "Barack Obama’s incredible risks on world security."