When you signal to the guy on the other side of the table that you’re not willing to either blow him up or blow him off — to get up and walk away — you reduce yourself to just an equal and get the best bad deal nonviolence can buy.
.. After beginning the negotiations by insisting that the Tehran regime relinquish all its suspect enrichment facilities and cease all its nuclear activities relevant to making a bomb, the Obama administration has ended by permitting Iran to keep virtually all of those facilities and continue some of those activities.”
How did this happen? “Part of the explanation may lie in Barack Obama’s personal faith in the transformative power of exposure to the global economy.”
Why Aren’t We Asking Iran for More?
Last January, on a visit to Beirut, Lebanon, Javad Zarif, the Iranian foreign minister, laid a wreath of white flowers on the tomb of Imad Mughniyeh. Mughniyeh was a senior leader of Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group, and perhaps the most murderous terrorist leader in the world outside of Al Qaeda. In 2008, he was assassinated by agents from the C.I.A. and Mossad in a secret operation in Damascus.
Among the attacks that Mughniyeh helped execute were the bombings of the U.S. Embassy and Marine barracks in Beirut, in 1983, which killed three hundred and sixty-two people; the suicide bombings of the Israeli Embassy and the Jewish Community Center in Buenos Aires, in 1994, which killed a hundred and fourteen; and the truck bombing of Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, in 1996, which killed nineteen pilots with the U.S. Air Force.
Why would Zarif, Iran’s point man in the nuclear negotiations with the United States, pay homage to a Hezbollah terrorist?
Persian Gulf Allies Confront Crisis of Confidence in U.S.
Decades of cooperation and billions of dollars in weapons contracts have left the gulf nations deeply entwined with the United States and Britain in ways that cannot be quickly undone, analysts say.
.. American-made fighter jets are being used in the Saudi-led bombing campaign in Yemen, but “none of these airplanes would fly if the United States refused to send parts,” Dr. Seznec said.
.. “Just as the United States is trying to lessen its dependence on Saudi oil, the Saudis are trying to lessen as much as possible their reliance on the American alliance,” Mr. Shammari said.
.. “The Saudi air force could not carry out day-in, day-out bombing missions without help from U.S. trainers and maintenance experts and the flow of spare parts and ammunition,” said Bruce Riedel, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, speaking about the Saudi-led bombing campaign against Shiite rebels in Yemen.
.. Mr. Seznec, of the School of Advanced International Studies, estimates that Saudi Arabia has spent about $500 billion to build its military in the last 20 years. About three-quarters of that money has gone to the United States.
Iran Proxy Deal: Ordinary State or Islamic Revolutionary State?
For us, this is a pure nuclear negotiation, but, for Iran, the nuclear issue “is a proxy for what kind of country it wants to be — an ordinary state or an Islamic revolutionary state.
..That is why Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was telling the truth when he recently said that he has not made up his mind about this deal. He’s having an identity crisis. He wants sanctions relief without integration. After all, if Iran is a normal state, who needs a medieval cleric to be the “supreme leader?”