Einstein’s Definition of Insanity:
Doing the same thing over and over again
and expecting different results
On Saturday, October 20, the New York Times reported that a senior administration official said that Iran and the Obama administration have agreed in principal to bilateral talks after the election. How sweet. Four years after President Obama told the world that he was ready to talk to the leaders of Iran directly without preconditions, they called him back. Maybe one of them listened to that pop single Call Me Maybe and decided to give it a try. Maybe not.
Let’s do a little gut check on the reality of our relationship with Iran over the past 30 plus years since Ahmadinejad and his buddies camped out in the American embassy for 444 days in 1979-1980 holding 52 Americans hostage. Iranian terrorist proxies have brutally, spectacularly and humiliatingly killed at least 300 Americans in the past 30 years: 17 Americans killed in April 1983 at the U.S. Embassy in Beirut by the predecessor to Hezbollah; 241 U.S. servicemen killed by Islamic Jihad at the Marine barracks in Beirut on Oct. 23, 1983; in June 1985 Robert Dean Stethem, beaten to death by a Hezbollah terrorist aboard TWA flight 847 and William Francis Buckley, the CIA station chief in Beirut, tortured to death by Hezbollah; in 1988,Marine Col. William Higgins, taken hostage and hanged by Hezbollah while serving with U.N. peacekeepers in Lebanon; and 19 U.S. Air Force personnel killed in June 1996 in the Khobar Towers bombing by Hezbollah associates in Saudi Arabia.
Throughout the Iraq war and even today in Afghanistan, Iran has manufactured, supplied, trained and infiltrated terrorists to assist in killing and maiming American armed forces with IEDs. And there are numerous other instances where American civilians have been held hostage or imprisoned on a pretense.
The American response is embarrassing. No one, not Reagan, the two Bushes, Clinton or Obama, has taken a single meaningful action to respond to these atrocities; unless you count the support we gave to Iraq in the Iran Iraq War of 1980 to 1988. So how do you think we are viewed by the government of Iran? Hint: Osama Bin Laden said in 2001: “When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature, they will like the strong horse.”
So now, after all of these unanswered atrocities;, after an Iranian agent was caught trying to assassinate the Saudi Arabian ambassador to the U.S. in Washington, D.C.,; after nearly 10 years of ever expanding uranium enrichment activities and hiding and hardening of nuclear facilities;, after rebukes to the authority of the International Atomic Energy Agency and the stonewalling of its inspectors efforts to see the facilities most critical to the Iranian nuclear program; and after three fruitless rounds of multi-lateral talks in the past two years;, is Iran suddenly going to change its heart and negotiate away its nuclear weapons program to the weak horse? Not likely.
President Obama is fond of sneering at Governor Romney: “What would you do differently?” The question is a little off. After four years of Obama showing weakness to Iran (and the entire Islamic Jihadist world), our options are severely limited, especially within the time constraints imposed by the “redline” (wherever that may be) for Iran to develop nuclear weapons capability. The question really should be directed at Obama himself: “What should you have done differently?”
Sadly, we cannot go back, but we do not have to keep riding the weak horse. Let’s get on the strong horse and see where he can take us.