Empty Boast From An Empty Suit

It was not even three weeks ago that Barack Hussein Obama was insisting that a theocratic, apocalypticist, nuclear-armed Islamic Iran was "no serious threat" because it does not possess the planetary military might of the old Soviet Empire.  After absorbing humiliating rebukes across almost the entire political spectrum for that excusion in idiocy, but for God only knows what reason still being dubbed the "presumptive" Democrat presidential nominee, now he's going before the pro-Israel lobby and audaciously (which is to say Clintonianly) trying to sing the opposite tune:

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama said on Wednesday Iran posed a serious threat in the Middle East and vowed to stop it from acquiring a nuclear weapon.

"The danger from Iran is grave, it is real, and my goal will be to eliminate this threat," Obama said in a speech to a conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a pro-Israel lobby group.

"I will do everything in my power to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, everything in my power to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon - everything," he said to a standing ovation.

Wow.  For a guy that only last summer expressed his eagerness to travel the world in 2009 Frenching the hindquarters of every U.S. enemy on the planet, he certainly does spread thick the veneer of a born-again neocon, doesn't he?  But look at his exactingly careful choice of terms; while "eliminate this threat" and "I will do everything in my power" do sound sufficiently aggressive to be reassuring to even bigger naifs than he is, they remain, in point of fact, generalities that do not jibe with pretty much all of his rhetoric on the subject of the mullahgarchy.  It would only have taken one follow-up question to burst that faux jingoistic camouflage: "Senator Obama, how would you eliminate the threat of Iranian nuclear weapons?"  His answer, after a fusillade of hems and haws and uhs and ahs and urs and ums, would be: through "aggressive personal diplomacy."  In fact, after the anti-Semitic, anti-Israel, anti-American venom BO has soaked up from the Uncle Jeremiahs, Father Pflegers, and Weathermen Leninists over the past generation, it could not be anything else.

This is how His Eminence differs from the Clintons.  He may be robotically eloquent, he may effuse charm and charisma, but he's not a mind-controller like Sick Willie was.  He could probably get Pope Benedict XVI to like him personally, but he'd never be able to sell him a double bed.  He's an illusionist, not a bamboozler.  He doesn't win over opponents and undecideds by convincing everyone from a Klansman to a Trinity United congregant that he agrees and sympathizes with their specific concerns and agenda; he distracts them with clouds of gaseous, anesthetizing hand-waving until he gets nailed with specifics he doesn't have the ability to slither past, whereupon he beats another hasty retreat to the friendly Enemy Media tall grass and hopes it'll all blow over - until the next rake on the path to the White (?) House.

As it happened, former Israel Defense Minister Dr. Ephraim Sneh was also in Washington, also speaking to a pro-Israel group, and "pre-emptively" called BO's latest bluff:

Efforts by Iran to mislead the international community, including IAEA inspectors, about the status of its nuclear research and its refusal to back down despite three United Nations Security Council resolutions, made it clear that the world community must take “more robust measures” against Iran....

He....warned against the belief, currently championed by former president Jimmy Carter, and his former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski — now a foreign policy adviser to Democratic presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama — that the United States can “negotiate” with Iran’s leaders.

Carter urged the Bush Administration on Tuesday to rapidly open negotiations with Iran to impress upon them the consequences of a possible U.S. military attack on their country, because Iran’s leaders are “reasonable people” and “are not suicidal” and could be expected to back down.

Sneh swept aside negotiations as naïve and dangerously misinformed.

“If the Ayatollahs believe that the price for their aggression is five million Iranians dead, they will think that it is worth doing,” he said.

“You have to understand, this leadership [in Iran] is living according to a very extremist, fanatic, messianic Shiite mythology of bringing back the 12th imam. They are not thinking in the way you and I think. And for them, the destruction of the Jewish state [and the United States] is a target, an objective, that is worth a big sacrifice.”

Only they don't think they'll have to pay it, because they look at Carter and Brzezinski and their party and their party's "presumptive" presidential nominee and conclude that even if they were to eschew terrorist proxies and openly launch a barrage of nuclear missiles at American cities, we would not retaliate but instead press all the harder for more "negotiations" to rectify whatever "offense" (doubtless Bush-caused, even more doubtless the invasion of Iraq and the feeble attempt to deny the mullahs nukes) that caused those "reasonable people" to take such a drastic action.

Adds Ken Timmerman:

Sneh is a member of the Labor Party, Olmert’s coalition party in the current government. His remarks and those of Likud Party Benjamin Netanyahu recently demonstrate strongly the consensus within the Israeli political establishment as to danger of a nuclear-armed Iran.

Appearing together with Sneh at an international conference in Herzliya, Israel last month, Netanyahu said that Iran had no fear of an Israeli counter-strike and that “nothing” would stop the Tehran regime from attacking Israel [and the United States] except a pre-emptive strike. [emphasis added] 

I take reports of this "consensus" with a grain of salt given that the governing portion of the Israeli political establishment lacked the courage and competence to even defeat one of Iran's proxy armies in Lebanon two years ago.  Still, it's a far more sober, serious, and realistic consensus than the galloping fantasist version gripping our own poobahry.  That's hardly a surprise, given that Isreal is (1) so much closer, (2) so much smaller (it wouldn't take more than three or four modest sized warheads to incinerate Haifa, Tel Aviv, and Israel's suspected nuclear sites in the Negev) and (3) has had to be sober, serious, and realistic since its 1948 national return for just those reasons.  They do not have, and have never had, the luxury of indulging in willful self-delusion and diplomacy fetishes as official state policy (the "peace process" notwithstanding).  Not when being wrong can result in another Holocaust, only this one of thirty minutes' duration.

Since 9/11, our own margin for error has gotten a lot slimmer.  But such has been our success in grinding down al Qaeda in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere, and thus preventing additional homeland attacks, that we, the people, have gone back to sleep, re-embraced clueless complacency, and even heartily endorsed the demonization and villification of the only foreign policy/national security stance - the original Bush Doctrine of pre-emptively eliminating rogue WMD threats before they can metastasize and attack us and our allies - that can actually "eliminate this threat" of a nuclear-armed Iran.  And leading the demonization and villification has been....Barack Hussein Obama.

Here's another exit question for the twenty-first-century Golden Calf: If your "aggressive personal diplomacy" fails, or proves actively counterproductive and encourages the Iranians to attack Israel with nuclear weapons without fear of reprisal, would you, as president, retaliate for the destruction of Tel Aviv by ordering the eradication of Tehran?  Or, short of that, would you order an immediate, all-out invasion of Iran?  And in either case, would you do so knowing the possible cost could include massive, perhaps WMD, terrorist reprisals here at home?  Or would you conclude instead that your "personal diplomacy" had not been "aggressive" enough and intensify your efforts toward a "negotiated" resolution?

If McCain poses that in the inevitable debates, Obama might just go catatonic.

If he doesn't, you'll know he's been getting coaching from you-know-what.