Predictable Postscript

You know President George W. Obama's K-Mart deck chair act with the Iranians from earlier this week?  Do I really have to report how it turned out, like the result is actually news?

Oh, bleep it, sadist that I am, I'm doing it anyway:

The presence of [Undersecretary of State William] Burns had led to hopes of compromise on a formula under which Iran would agree to stop expanding its enrichment activities…

But doubt was cast over the value of talks less then an hour after they started, when Keyvan Imani, a member of the Iranian delegation, appeared to indicate that Tehran was not prepared to budge on enrichment.

“Suspension — there is no chance for that,” he told reporters gathered in the courtyard of Geneva’s ornate City Hall, the venue of the negotiations.

There also appeared to be little progress inside the talks.

You know why they blatantly dissed Burns, don't you?  He wouldn't be nearly a valuable enough hostage.  They're holding out until the real, genuine, honest-to-Allah President of the United States of America himself makes the pilgrimmage to Tehran, whereafter they can seize him and start "negotiations" interest - only ones having nothing to do with their nuclear weapons program.  Like, maybe, dismantling Israel for them and building a string of gas chambers and crematoria in the Holy Land for the mullahs' use after we vacate the region.  Hey, it'd be giving us a head start before they came after us next with the nukes they were able to save from not having to use them on the Jews.

I think it's pretty clear it's Obama they're waiting for, because he'll be foolish enough to actually go.

In the meantime, how many contemptuous rebuffs of ourselves and the EUnuchs does this make by now?  Has anybody bothered to keep a running tally?  It's like watching the Skipper and Gilligan arm wrestle.  How many times do Iranian "negotiators" have to sneeringly tell us to go jump in the septic tank on uranium enrichment before somebody on the Western side finally grasps and accepts that diplomacy on Iranian nukes is futile, pointless, and has ventured to the farthest reaches of neurosis?

The answer appears to be infinity, as Javier Solana (who, if you'll recall, was the BS-spouting NATO Secretary-General during Bill Clinton's rape of Serbia nine years ago), speaking for us and the EU, has arranged yet another meeting with the mullahgarchists two weeks from now.  To what avowed purpose?  Apparently to "give them more time" to consider the appallingly generous bribe - oh, sorry, "incentive package" - that the Iranians chortlingly ignored a month ago.

Sometimes, late at night when everything is quiet, I wonder what it'd be like to be the proverbial fly on the wall during Guardian Council meetings and see whether the Ayahtollahs really do roar with laughter at our insatiable appetite for public humiliation.  I guess it goes to show that history really is cyclical, most especially its worst dynamics.  Just as Adolph Hitler wrote his blueprint for conquest of first Germany, then Europe, and then the entire planet, then started systematically working his way through it right in front of his intended victims, and they never lifted a finger to stop him but instead just pumped the air full of pointless words, so the Islamic Republic is proclaiming its intention to build nuclear weapons with which to annihilated Israel and the West, and is steadily working towards that goal, and yet we, the mullahs intended victims, refuse to lift a finger to stop them, but instead ply them endlessly and obsequiously for an endless river of extraneous dialogue.  The former resulted in global war, sixty million deaths, and near genocide of world Jewry; the latter will result in far worse carnage, and finishing the job the Nazis started.

Yet all we care about is another meeting.  And another and another and another and another and another, and then another beyond that.  Because one of those meetings might be the "breakthrough" that the diplodiddlers have been waiting for for...how many years now?

Some - perhaps many - who read my words on this tiresome yet terrifying subject doubtless would brand me a warmonger.  Which would be [drumroll, please] a smear (Yes, Jon Frederson, I remember you.).  In truth, I have no inherent hostility to diplomacy; it's a tool of statecraft just as military force is.  I agree that talking should be the first resort, and unleashing the dogs of war the last.

But if negotiations go nowhere, you have to be willing to walk away from them and consider other options.  The point of diplomacy isn't to keep yammering until you produce a signed piece of paper to wave around; it is to attain your foreign policy objectives.  In this case, our objective is to deny the Iranian theocracy nuclear weapons.  It was clear years ago that they were, and are, NEVER going to willingly acede to that demand, no matter what or how much we offer them in return.  They won't take bribes, they have no better nature to which to appeal (because they think we're the evil ones), sanctions won't budge them (any more than they did Saddam Hussein), and after all this groveling, to say nothing of merely having to turn on CNN to gauge the American domestic political climate, it's safe to say that we're incapable of intimidating them.  And given that they would welcome a nuclear conflagration - why else do you think they're building their own nukes? - it's questionable at best whether there are any circumstances under which they could EVER be intimidated.

All of this diplomatic five-knuckle-shuffling could have been distilled down to a single ten-second exchange:

WEST: Please stop developing nuclear weapons.

IRAN: Kiss our ass, infidels!  We will make you all BURN!

That's where diplomacy should have ended.  Genuine negotiating can only produce a constructive result when both sides respect each other.  Ronald Reagan would never have gotten a verifiable mid-range ballistic missile treaty out of Mikhail Gorbachev in 1988 had he not told the Soviet dictator to have relations with a borscht in Reykavik three years earlier after Gorby demanded that the Gipper give up SDI.  That same credibility is why the Berlin Wall fell just two years after the fortieth President went to the Brandenberg Gate in Berlin and demanded that "Mr. Gorbachev" tear it down.

Can anybody possibly believe that after years of playing Morton Goldthwait to the mullahs' Paige Fox, the Iranians could EVER have the slightest subatomic particle of respect for the EUnuchs or ourselves EVER again?

I know why the Iranians keep up this unmitigated charade: (1) to gain the time to build their nuclear arsenal to Russianesque proportions; (2) to indulge the same kind of psychotic fascination that compels us to looky-loo at grisly car wrecks or watch Quint get devoured by the great white shark at the end of Jaws; and (3) sadism.  But why do WE persist?  Foreign policy battered wife syndrome?  A lost bet?  Turban envy?

If there's a bright side to this bottomless embarrassment, it's that it will not, after all, go on forever.  Sooner or later (probably sooner) the mullahs will break off negotiations.

What comes next will require no words - beyond a whole lotta praying, followed by a reckoning with the so-called "leaders" that let it happen by those who survive.

I promise you, those words will be anything but pointless.