Playing Hard To Get?

The established Obama-Iranian mullagharchy dynamic: Barry begs for direct talks with Ahmadinejad without conditions and accepting any and all conditions demanded by Tehran, including excluding their nuclear weapons program and human rights atrocities from the agenda; the mullahs show just enough leg to keep The One panting after them, eventually granting us an audience - or not - at their general whim and specific time needs of the moment.

That makes this development more than a little gulp-inducing:

A suicide bomber killed thirty-one people today, including five or six senior members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. Among the remaining dead were other Guard members, or local tribal leaders, and several dozen others were wounded. The story can be found here and here.

Even though a local Sunni group called Jundollah (God’s soldiers), claimed responsibility, the Islamic regime wasted no time in exploiting a potentially golden opportunity:

“We consider the recent terrorist attack to be the result of US action. This is the sign of America’s animosity against our country,” [Parliamentary speaker Ali] Larijani said.

“Mr. Obama has said he will extend his hand towards Iran, but with this terrorist action he has burned his hand,” he said referring to US President Barack Obama’s repeated diplomatic overtures to Tehran.

The Guards said foreign powers were behind the attack.

“The world arrogance, by provoking its lackeys and mercenaries in the region, carried out a terrorist attack on a popular meeting between the Guards and tribesmen,” the Guards said in a statement carried by local media.

Iranian officials and several government bodies term Western powers, including the United States, as “world arrogance.”

Serendipitously, guess what was scheduled to kick off in Geneva today?  Direct U.S.-Iranian talks.  Now guess what may happen to those talks:

The threats, broadcast on Iranian television and in statements from the country’s atomic energy organization, may have simply been negotiating tactics ahead of negotiations that started in Vienna, the city that saw so many Cold War nuclear talks between the United States and the Soviet Union…

“By the end of these next two days,” one senior administration official in Washington said, “we’ll know if the Iranians are serious and whether we have time” to pursue further diplomacy with Iran without fearing that it could race ahead to produce a weapon.

Or....they may just walk out.  They're already reneging on letting the Russians enrich their uranium stockpile, which would be largely irrelevant anyway since all outsourcing it will accomplish is to save the mullahs the time, trouble, and cost of doing it themselves.  That, in turn, is a companion to Moscow's own backstabbing on allowing tougher U.N. sanctions, which themselves are also irrelevant and pointless.  All of this mind-numbingly futile diplodiddling while the doomsday clock tick-tick-ticked toward midnight has been for the purpose, from Tehran's point of view, of gaining the time they needed to build their nuclear arsenal.

Well, what if this incendiary accusation over the Jundollah attack - whether they were responsible or the mullahs engaged in a bit of their own version of the Gleiwitz incident (and please, spare me the foolish speculation about "Could the mullahs be right?") - isn't about pre-negotiation maneuvering?  Suppose that the Iranian regime has completed its nuclear production line already, built and deployed several warheads via its overseas terror networks, and decided to "not let a crisis go to waste"?  That would certainly be escalating their thirty-year war against "the Great Satan" on their terms and timetable.  And the unprecedented surrender of the Obama administration of any negotiating advantage and deterrent has given the mullahs every reason in the world to believe they can attack and cripple us with impunity and free of the remotest fear of reprisal.

For five years we had to listen to the Left's shrill faux moral dudgeon about Bush "overestimating" Saddam Hussein's WMD threat.  In reality, of course, the six months Dubya wasted going back for one more Security Council resolution provided Saddam all the time he needed to stash his chemical weapons stockpile in Syria.  But even if he hadn't had any WMDs, it was still better to have erred on the side of caution than to have gambled that he was farther away from gaining them than he really was.  Here and now the American Left is making that diametically opposite, and immensely more dangerous, mistake.

Sooner or later, we're going to pay for it - dearly.  Is that piper coming to collect even sooner than we think?