Now It’s Up to Israel — and American Jews

Jennifer Rubin
Contentions/Commentary
18 May '10
Posted before Chag

Even the New York Times has figured out that Obama has been checkmated by the mullahs’ deal to send an itty bit of its enriched uranium to Iran-friendly Brazil and Turkey:

Iran announced an agreement on Monday to ship some of its nuclear fuel to Turkey in a deal that could offer a short-term solution to its nuclear standoff with the West, or prove to be a tactic aimed at derailing efforts to bring new sanctions against Tehran. …

Obama now faces a vexing choice. If he walks away from this deal, it will look like he is rejecting an agreement similar to one he was willing to sign eight months ago. But if he accepts, many of the urgent issues he wants resolved with Iran in coming months — mostly over suspected weapons work — will be put on hold for a year or more. Many American officials believe the delay is Iran’s most immediate goal.

By opening the door to an enrichment-shuffling deal and pleading for Iran to come back to the bargaining table, Obama set himself up for failure. He now faces the collapse of his anemic sanctions effort and the evaporation of the last chance to stave off Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons, short of military action — which no one (not Congress, not Iran, not Israel, not American Jewish “leaders”) believes Obama will undertake.

Bret Stephens observes:

In yesterday’s phony triumph of diplomacy, any real hope for a diplomatic outcome ended. In its most crucial foreign policy test, the administration has lost, or ceded, control of the process. Iran is either going to become a nuclear power, or it will be stopped from doing so by military action. Either a war will be upon us, or a cycle of Mideast nuclear proliferation. The administration fancies it can contain all this—Iran’s ambitions, Arab insecurities, Israel’s existential anxiety—via more smart diplomacy. The record so far does not inspire confidence.

But to be clear: either Israel will take military action or Iran will become a nuclear power.

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