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Word comes tonight that the so-called “Iran + 5+ 1” talks have reached a preliminary agreement.   Reuters tells the story.

The Western powers, including the United States, will ease sanctions against Iran, including releasing tens of billions of dollars in Iranian assets worldwide, resuming oil and precious metals trade, and importation of aircraft parts, for Iranian promises to suspend weapons-grade uranium enrichment.

Some say that Iran’s anti-US and anti-Israel rhetoric is not to be taken seriously, that Iran’s interests and those of the United States make rapproachment a logical move by both countries.  That it is interests, and not ideology, that determines the course of a nation’s statecraft.   There is talk that new Iranian President Hassan Rouhani is a moderate who represents a significant shift in Iran’s policies and objectives from his predecessor, the mercurial Mahmoud Ahmedinejad.

Believe none of it.  The trappings of office of Iran’s Presidency are so much window dressing.  It is the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ali Khamenei, who is the holder of power.  This is the same Khamenei whom, less than a week ago, predicted the “extinction” of Israel.

In essence, any Iranian pledge to suspend uranium enrichment is unverifiable, any agreement unenforceable.  Iran has been given license, and international recognition of its “right”, to enrich uranium for any purpose it chooses, handed to them by a weak, amateurish, bumbling Obama Administration.  Israel, the only western-style democracy in the Middle East and vital US ally, has been cut adrift.  She stands alone, precariously, while her neighbors plot her destruction with, for all intent, the permission of the United States.

This deal, if reports are accurate, is the biggest American foreign policy catastrophe in the history of this nation.  We have sold our honor for a promise.  And with that honor, sold the security of our ally.   Like Munich, this dark episode in Geneva may be a precursor to the slaughter of many of the Jewish race.   Israel is not Czechoslovakia, however.  Benjamin Netanyahu has no intention of capitulating.  Which of course means that war in the Middle East just became far more likely than less.  Tensions are not eased, but heightened.

Interestingly, Netanyahu is in Moscow, and not Washington, during this crucial period.   He has little regard for Obama, believes Obama to be untrustworthy, weak, and more than a bit anti-Israel.   With good reason.   The shameful events of November 23rd, 2013 may not lead to war, or to Israel’s destruction.  But if we are fortunate enough to avoid that eventuality, it will be Israel, and not the United States, that will prevent that outcome.   Israel now stands entirely alone.  Because the greatest nation on earth has leaders without the courage and honor to stand with its allies, and without the character to recognize that the promise of peace at the expense of the security of your friends is no peace at all.

Weep for our Republic.   The price of our folly will be the lives and liberty of our posterity.   Our leaders are without shame.  Which brings shame upon us all.

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Just yesterday, we reflected on the death of a President whom, in his Inaugural Address said:

Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty. …

Fifty years is a very long time in America, it would seem.

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The real impact of the Iran “deal” is nicely summed up by John Bolton, who calls the Obama Administration “feckless” and the agreement “abject surrender”.   Difficult in the extreme to argue the contrary, if one has any grip on reality.

This interim agreement is badly skewed from America’s perspective.  Iran retains its full capacity to enrich uranium, thus abandoning a decade of Western insistence and Security Council resolutions that Iran stop all uranium-enrichment activities. Allowing Iran to continue enriching, and despite modest (indeed, utterly inadequate) measures to prevent it from increasing its enriched-uranium stockpiles and its overall nuclear infrastructure, lays the predicate for Iran fully enjoying its “right” to enrichment in any “final” agreement.  Indeed, the interim agreement itself acknowledges that a “comprehensive solution” will “involve a mutually defined enrichment program.”  This is not, as the Obama administration leaked before the deal became public, a “compromise” on Iran’s claimed “right” to enrichment. This is abject surrender by the United States.

Think of it as a Nuclear Munich.