Let me make it clear that I’m happy that Beau Bergdahl is home. Mostly because it’s now possible for him to be court-martialed under the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
I’m more troubled by the deals that Obama is making right now.
On Tuesday I had Townhall’s political editor, Guy Benson, who officially is one of the top 30 under 30 something or others in the world apparently.
Let’s just say he’s a really big deal.
He is troubled as well. He pointed out that the Obama has a habit of making bad deals.
In China, we entered a so-called “climate change” deal that gave China everything and we got nothing, except the bill for China’s growth.
In Cuba we lifted an embargo and got little in return, and even what we got wasn’t delivered.
In the Bergdhal deal we released top terrorists-- some of whom say they will come back to fight the United States-- in what the Obama administration said was a prisoner exchange. But really they just want to shut down GITMO.
Or maybe they are making room at Guantanamo Bay so that they house only families making $250,000 or more per year.
Don’t worry: None of this will affect you…until it does
But what troubles both Guy Benson and me most are the on-going negotiations with Tehran over their nuclear program.
Iran will get the bomb not despite the efforts of the United States, but because of the efforts of the United States.
You see, Obama is embarked on wishful-thinking diplomacy, or he’s an idiot, or he’s a traitor to the interests of the United States.
Perhaps it’s a little from each column.
Because when you look at his track record on foreign and defense policy, you can’t be as wrong as he has been without some deliberation.
How to characterize that intent is really the only question.
If that doesn’t bother you it should.
“Iran has built a 27-meter-long missile, capable of delivering a warhead ‘far beyond Europe,’ and placed it on a launch pad at a site close to Tehran, an Israeli television report said Wednesday, showing what it said were the first satellite images of the missile ever seen in the West,” says the Times of Israel.
The obvious target beyond Europe isn’t China either.
Iran has since 1979 assumed the place of the former Soviet Union as the prime America hater worldwide. But whereas the Soviets refrained from nuclear confrontation out of a self of sense preservation, it doesn’t take an active imagination to ponder Iranian leaders who lack that sense of proportion.
And as I wrote previously, it would only take a relatively small yield nuclear weapon, with the ability to reach the United States, to destroy about two-thirds of the electric capacity of the country if detonated at about 200 miles above the earth.
That means no water will flow, no cars will start, no radios work, no computers, no hospitals, no refrigeration, except those shielded from electromagnetic pulse.
That is why it is so puzzling that Obama is working so hard to lift the sanctions on Iran. While the sanctions have not prevented the Iranians from making progress on a nuclear weapon, it has slowed the progress better than negotiations have.
But unlike the bad deals cut for Bergdhal, Cuba and even China, the deal Obama might make with Iran will have strategic importance that is forever unchangeable short of war.
That should worry everyone.