Post-American Presidency (23 page)

The incident underscored the urgency of stopping Iran’s nuclear ambitions. A country that would smuggle conventional weapons to a terrorist group would smuggle nuclear weapons to that terror group as well. But with Barack Obama in the White House, Israel faced hard choices.

On October 23, 2009, the American Enterprise Institute held a panel discussion entitled “Should Israel Attack Iran?” Dictating the choice of topic was the obvious fact that Barack Hussein Obama, with his ever-outstretched hand, would not attack Iran, no matter how real and present a danger the Iranian nuclear program turned out to be. That left it up to Israel to do the job—if Israel was not to be impeded in that by Obama himself.

On the panel, Bolton said that force was “required” to keep Iran from getting nuclear weapons. What about Obama’s outstretched hand? Bolton said that solutions other than taking out Iran’s nuclear facilities “have failed, are failing and will fail.” UN resolutions, he noted, had “no material impact on Iran’s nuclear weapons program,” and “the prospect of sanctions in the future is illusory.… The combination of Russian and Chinese action in the Security Council on any hypothetical fourth resolution would end up watering it down just like the first three.”

Yet despite the fact that an Israeli strike at Iran’s nuclear facilities could save the free world (and much of the unfree world), Bolton predicted that such an attack would “cause a very dramatic break in the relationship between the Obama administration and Israel.”

No big surprise there.

Was there any alternative? Bolton said that “the ideal outcome is regime change”—and never was the Islamic Republic of Iran closer to that possibility than in the summer of 2009 during the demonstrations against the election results.
⁵⁶

But Barack Obama did nothing. The president was naked at the feast.

Only Israel was ready to act. Israeli deputy foreign minister Danny Ayalon demonstrated in a November 2009 interview that he was not nearly as overawed by the mullahs as Barack Obama appeared to be. “The one who’s bluffing,” said Ayalon, “is Iran, which is trying to play with cards they don’t have. All the bravado that we see and the testing and the very dangerous and harsh rhetoric are hiding a lot of weaknesses.”
⁵⁷

Strong words—so unlike Barack Obama’s.

When I interviewed Ambassador Bolton on July 30, 2009, he said: “For me the real long-term answer to the Iranian nuclear weapons program is a change of regime. Again, not just a change of Ahmadinejad, the overthrow of the Islamic revolution of 1979. If Obama and the United States are not willing to work for that end, then we can count on not just the mullahs being in charge for a long time, but possibly even worse, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, who are more fanatic, more militaristic, and the ones in charge of the nuclear program.”
⁵⁸

Obama’s missed opportunity looked worse by the minute.

THE UN WATCHPUPPY

With an impotent president at the helm of the most powerful country in the world, the powers arrayed against that country behaved as if they had been given a free hand. Obama clung desperately to his naïve
belief that if he begged the Iranians often enough, and received with patience their slights, their insults, their slaps to the face, he would eventually be able to blunt the force of their jihad.

And meanwhile, the Iranians continued to pursue their nuclear aspirations, without any indication whatsoever that Barack Hussein Obama was deterring them from doing so. In fact, at one terrible historic moment at the United Nations, Obama gave the mullahs every reason to believe that he would do nothing to impede their nuclear ambitions. In September 2009, Obama chaired a session of the United Nations Security Council. According to Anne Bayefsky, “he turned it into a summit of heads of state and chose the agenda. He insisted—in the words of the advance American ‘concept paper’—that ‘The Security Council Summit will focus on nuclear non-proliferation and nuclear disarmament broadly and
not focus on any specific countries.
’ Obama pushed hard for the adoption of a new Security Council resolution, which was passed unanimously, and
which never mentions Iran or North Korea
.”
⁵⁹

To speak about nuclear nonproliferation and nuclear disarmament without ever once mentioning Iran and North Korea is only to demonstrate your fear of standing up to either one.

For the leader of the free world to manifest such fear was disappointing, especially coming when it did. When Obama chaired the Security Council session, it was only weeks after the United Arab Emirates had informed the council that it had taken control of a ship that had been sailing under the flag of the Bahamas and was full of North Korean–made weapons and explosives—bound for Iran in defiance of UN sanctions. The Security Council committee that oversees sanctions wrote to both Tehran and Pyongyang asking for explanations, and received no response.

Chairing the Security Council, Barack Obama could have challenged
the North Koreans and the Iranians about their defiance of the sanctions, as well as about their nuclear programs in general.

Instead, he only reinforced their perception of him as weak and unwilling to stand up to them.

In our July 2009 interview Ambassador Bolton spoke critically of “the inexperience and naïveté, really, of the Obama administration.” He said that “statesmanship, if it’s anything, is looking decades into the future trying to identify risks and challenges and opportunities and structuring events as they develop to maximize the opportunities and minimize the risks.”

But Obama had done nothing like this: “So when you hear Obama during the campaign saying, ‘Well, Iran is a small country… it doesn’t represent a big threat,’ you know that may be true today, with respect to the United States, but Iran [and] North Korea are not small threats to our friends and allies in their area—Japan and South Korea with respect to North Korea, Israel and the Arab states in the Persian Gulf when they look at Iran. And moreover… you have to go longer than just the next six month or twelve months, you have to say, ‘What are the implications for the world at large if Iran gets nuclear weapons?’”

Bolton continued:

Barack Obama never showed any signs of having considered any of that. And in March 2009, Ambassador Bolton summed up the weakness of his position: “There is no evidence that Mr. Obama knows substantively how to stop Iran, which senses the palpable vulnerability inherent in his pell-mell rush to the bargaining table. More importantly, his disjointed diplomacy masks a profound strategic disorder, one potentially far more damaging than the photo op urge to shake hands with an Iranian.”
⁶¹

INTERNATIONALLY IMPOTENT

Speaking in Prague, a city that lived under the shadow of the Cold War for decades, Obama in April 2009 unveiled an ambitious plan to divest the world of nuclear weapons and usher in a new era of peace. But, of course, since Obama controlled only the American nuclear arsenal, that was the only one he could dismantle. And he announced his intention to do just that.

“The United States,” he declared, “has a moral responsibility to act. We cannot succeed in this endeavor alone, but we can lead it, we can start it.” Alone. “I’m not naïve,” he hastened to assure the world, but he certainly gave the impression that he was.

“To put an end to Cold War thinking,” Obama said, “we will reduce the role of nuclear weapons in our national security strategy, and urge others to do the same.” We
will
reduce the role of nukes in our own defense, and
urge
others to do likewise. “We will,” the president added, “begin the work of reducing our arsenal.”
⁶²

Obama’s plan essentially amounted to disarming free, rational nations and allowing rogue nuclear proliferators to run wild—after all, this was the man who said two months after this speech in Prague that oil-rich Iran “has legitimate energy concerns, legitimate aspirations”
that made its intention to become a nuclear power reasonable and justifiable.
⁶³

So apparently in Barack Obama’s ideal world, the United States would divest itself of nuclear weapons just as Iran developed the use of nuclear energy, and the United States would trust Iran to abide by international nonproliferation agreements and refrain from weaponizing its new energy source.

And the international agencies in which Obama placed so much hope only mirrored his impotence. So it was that in November 2009 the International Atomic Energy Agency, universally known as the “UN’s nuclear watchdog,” discovered that the Iranians had conducted tests of a nuclear warhead design that is so advanced, and so top secret, that officially the United States and Britain do not even acknowledge that it exists. But it does exist, and Iran has apparently tested it.

This was still more unmistakable evidence that the Iranians have been lying to the world for months and years on end as they have repeatedly insisted that their nuclear program is peaceful in intent, and that they have no intention of manufacturing nuclear warheads at all. It was proof of the duplicity and untrustworthiness of the Islamic regime, and of its constituting a danger to Israel (which has repeatedly been threatened by Iranian leaders) and to the world at large.

It was a challenge, and an opportunity. Obama could have dropped his beggar’s pose and asked the UN for an immediate stiffening of sanctions. He could have put Iran on notice that the United States—not Israel alone—would destroy Iran’s nuclear weapons program before Iran got anywhere close to the capability of sending a nuke into Tel Aviv.

But Obama still did nothing. The only response came from the IAEA. Brave, fearless, and courageous as ever, the agency asked Iran for… an explanation.
⁶⁴

That’s it. No sanctions. No condemnation. Certainly no threat of war backed by the will to follow through on that threat if necessary.

An explanation.

With a weak president in the White House, there was a vacuum, a void—one that evil was only too happy to fill.

On Friday, November 27, 2009, the IAEA called on the Iranian mullahs to stop their uranium-enrichment activities. And so on Sunday, showing how much they feared the wrath of the United Nations and the post-American president, Barack Hussein Obama, the mullahs gave the green light to a plan to build ten new uranium-enrichment plants.

This is the same IAEA whose chief, Mohamed Mostafa ElBaradei, said in October that “Israel is No. 1 threat to Middle East.”

The American economist Thomas Sowell said that Obama is “heading this country toward disaster on many fronts, including a nuclear Iran, which has every prospect of being an irretrievable disaster of almost unimaginable magnitude. We cannot put that genie back in the bottle—and neither can generations yet unborn. They may yet curse us all for leaving them hostages to nuclear terror.”
⁶⁵

If history has taught us anything, it’s that if weapons are produced, they are used, and if war is talked into the people, one day it becomes a reality. And this is what we are witnessing with Iran. America has always been the force for good that has kept evil in check. Iran’s goal is a world living under Islamic law. In a post-American world, what at once seemed impossible is eminently possible.

A world made secure by America so far appears to be comfortable throwing off our cloak of protection. Yet the only reason there is any semblance of peace and tranquility around the world today is because of the military presence of the United States at points across the globe. Iran and the other members of the axis of evil are now working to take
advantage of regional and international opportunities that will arise if the United States is not there to stop them.

And they are likely to succeed.

A nuclear Iran in a post-American world would change the geopolitical landscape overnight. A nuclear Iran in a post-American world would result in an immense power shift in the Middle East and elsewhere. The balance of power would shift from democratic and free forces to the forces of Islam and Sharia.

And it is not just the Jewish state that is in Islam’s crosshairs; it is the whole of the West.

ON DECEMBER 1, 2009, BARACK OBAMA
MADE A MUCH-ANTICIPATED SPEECH AT THE
UNITED STATES MILITARY ACADEMY AT WEST POINT ON
what he had decided to do in Afghanistan. After considerable deliberation, he had determined to commit an additional 30,000 troops to that troubled nation, and then withdraw them by 2011. This was months after Gen. Stanley McChrystal requested over 60,000 troops, or at least 40,000. McChrystal said if the American presence in Afghanistan was not boosted, the United States could face “mission failure” in that nation.
¹

The speech had been a long time coming: the post-American president,
elected by a core constituency of hard-core antiwar Leftists, was clearly reluctant to alienate his base by furthering one of George W. Bush’s wars. However, he was also unwilling to pay the political price of withdrawing from Afghanistan at the same time as he was withdrawing from Iraq.

His ambivalence manifested itself as silence and dithering in the face of requests from American commanders in Afghanistan for more troops. The commander of American troops in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, said in an interview in late September 2009: “I’ve talked to the president, since I’ve been here, once on a VTC [video teleconference].”