Let’s play “Compare & Contrast.”

[Washington Times] Iran is poised to begin producing nuclear weapons after its uranium program expansion in 2009, even though it has had problems with thousands of its centrifuges, according to a newly released CIA report.

“Iran continues to develop a range of capabilities that could be applied to producing nuclear weapons, if a decision is made to do so,” the annual report to Congress states. … The CIA report is the latest official study expressing concern over Iran’s continuing nuclear activities. The International Atomic Energy Agency on March 3 issued a report warning that continuing nuclear activities in violation of U.N. resolutions raise “concerns about the possible existence in Iran of past or current undisclosed activities related to the development of a nuclear payload for a missile.”

Remember just a few years ago, right before the election cycle of 2008 had begun, right when the world was oh so concerned that the wicked Neocons and their ‘Israeli puppeteers’ were promoting a policy of aggression against poor misunderstood Iran?

Remember the Bush-era CIA? Remember their 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran? Danger? What danger? Nukes? Ah, Iran stopped trying to go nuclear yeaaars ago! Remember that? Google does:

NIE Report: Iran Halted Nuclear Weapons Program Years Ago
December 03, 2007 11:51 AM

ABC News’ Martha Raddatz, Jonathan Karl, Luis Martinez, Kirit Radia and Jennifer Duck Report: In a stunning reversal of Bush administration conventional wisdom, a new assessment by U.S. intelligence agencies concludes Iran shelved its nuclear weapons program over four years ago.

“We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program,” reads a declassified version of the National Intelligence Estimate key findings.

Yes, nothing to see here. Move along, move along. It’s just Dick Cheney and the Neocons lying again. We’re not naive. Iran is responding to international pressure. Senate Maj. Leader Harry Reid said so, so it MUST be true, right? What say you now, Harry Reid? This new report seems to “directly challenge some of your administration’s naive rhetoric about the threat posed by Iran.”

New York Times
U.S. Says Iran Ended Atomic Arms Work
By MARK MAZZETTI
Published: December 3, 2007

WASHINGTON, Dec. 3 — A new assessment by American intelligence agencies concludes that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 and that the program remains frozen, contradicting judgment two years ago that Tehran was working relentlessly toward building a nuclear bomb.

The conclusions of the new assessment are likely to reshape the final year of the Bush administration, which has made halting Iran’s nuclear program a cornerstone of its foreign policy. … The estimate does not say when American intelligence agencies learned that the weapons program had been halted, but a statement issued by Donald Kerr, the principal director of national intelligence, said the document was being made public “since our understanding of Iran’s capabilities has changed.”

Rather than painting Iran as a rogue, irrational nation determined to join the club of nations with the bomb, the estimate states Iran’s “decisions are guided by a cost-benefit approach rather than a rush to a weapon irrespective of the political, economic and military costs.” The administration called new attention to the threat posed by Iran earlier this year when President Bush had suggested in October that a nuclear-armed Iran could lead to “World War III” and Vice President Dick Cheney promised “serious consequences” if the government in Tehran did not abandon its nuclear program.

Yet at the same time officials were airing these dire warnings about the Iranian threat, analysts at the Central Intelligence Agency were secretly concluding that Iran’s nuclear weapons work halted years ago and that international pressure on the Islamic regime in Tehran was working.

Senator Harry Reid, the majority leader, portrayed the assessment as “directly challenging some of this administration’s alarming rhetoric about the threat posed by Iran.” He said he hoped the administration “appropriately adjusts its rhetoric and policy,” and called for a “a diplomatic surge necessary to effectively address the challenges posed by Iran.”

What’s changed? Nothing, except a blatantly politically-motivated intelligence agency wished to discredit the GOP prior to the 2008 election cycle. And how’d that work out for them? Well, ask the Democrats.

However, the times are a changing, because it would seem that those Democrats have also done some things to tick off the CIA, for now we have this new “No, no, Iran is dangerous after all!” report just days after the Obama Administration came down hard on Israel for their settlements and stance toward Iran.

Please pass President Obama a handkerchief so he may wipe all that egg off his face.

But which CIA do we believe? The one that says Iran is dangerous now? The one that said Iran wasn’t dangerous in 2007? Or the one that said Iran was dangerous in 2003?

And what’s the point of the NIE if they perpetually revise their assessments in 180-degree hard turns every few years? And what’s the point of an intelligence agency that’s so politically motivated?

For that matter, what’s the point of a free press that habitually takes sides? Please pass them a handkerchief as well. Or a chisel. That egg has hardened.

TEHRAN – Iran’s supreme leader, spurning what he described as several personal overtures from President Obama, warned Tuesday that negotiating with the United States would be “naive and perverted” and that Iranian politicians should not be “deceived” into starting such talks.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, 70, said Obama has approached him several times through oral and written messages. It was the second time that Khamenei, who wields ultimate political and religious authority in Iran, has referred to the president’s outreach.

The White House has not confirmed sending letters to the Iranian supreme leader but has acknowledged a willingness to talk to Tehran and said it has sought to communicate with Iranian leaders in a variety of ways.

I guess the Ayatollah doesn’t believe in “reset buttons.” And so once again we find the liberal’s notion of engagement lacking once it hits the hard shell of reality.

This week also marked the 30th anniversary of the U.S. hostage crisis in Iran, in which another equally inept American President displayed a lack of courage in the face of harsh adversity. Then again, at least Jimmy Carter tried once to stand up to the mullahs (before giving up after one bad day in the desert). Obama, on the other hand, simply responds with meaningless jargon, which no Iranian hardliner will ever respect, much less fear.

And just how impotent does Obama look in their eyes? The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reportedly asked Iran to “explain evidence suggesting that Iranian scientists have experimented with an advanced nuclear warhead design.” That’s pure contempt for every olive branch Obama has offered.

Indeed, anti-Ayatollah protesters in Iran are likewise fed up with the Obama administration’s refusal to promote democracy and angered by what they see as his betrayal of their Summer uprising. Here’s ABC News’ Jake Tapper:

“Obama, Obama, you are either with them or with us,” anti-government protestors chanted in Farsi in an amateur video.

Such an appeal, directed specifically at President Obama, is new among Iran’s anti-government protestors.

The Associated Press called the appeal startling.

Perhaps it’s startling for your average pro-Obama media lapdog, but for anyone who paid attention to the headlines in Iran over the past few months, it’s not.

Michael Goldfarb worded it best, “It’s like Battered Wives Syndrome, except President Obama is the bride with the black eye and Ayatollah Khameini is the abusive husband.”

Tammy Wynette, anyone?

This is a great commentary from Jonah Goldberg in their subscription version of National Review. The question he asks is, “Whatever happened to liberal idealism?” He notes a long history of liberal idealists, such as Harry Truman. And even more modern Democrat leaders who have had their own “American apology tours,” a la Bill Clinton apologizing for slavery or Rwanda, at least promoted the concept of American exceptionalism. Not so with with this most current crop of liberals in our White House and on Capital Hill. They instead promote the hamstringing of American exceptionalism.

Hence the New Liberal idealists’ top priority is for the American Gulliver to fall into line with the ranks of Lilliputians. And this is pretty thin gruel as far as idealism goes. The actions of the U.N. are, on a global level, the equivalent of seeing a little girl fall down a well and saying in response: “Let’s form a committee.” Actually, they are worse than that, because some of the committees at the U.N. are notorious for throwing little girls down wells. That’s why the excitement among liberal commentators over Obama’s decision to join the U.N. Human Rights Council — a den of villainy if ever there was one — was so depressing, and why Obama’s touting this decision as one of the noblest accomplishments of his administration is nothing short of perverse.

To see the enervating effects of this new idealism, consider Darfur. The genocide there was so bad it distracted George Clooney from supermodels. But what, exactly, does George Clooney want America to do? If you visit the website of “Not On Our Watch” — an organization founded by Clooney, Matt Damon, Brad Pitt, and other very concerned attractive people — you’ll be hard pressed to find an answer. “Not On Our Watch is committed to robust international advocacy and humanitarian assistance. . . . We encourage governing bodies to take meaningful, immediate action to protect the vulnerable, marginalized, and displaced.” Let’s form a committee!

Darfur activists implore Obama to “find” a “resolution” to the Darfur problem, as if such a resolution were like a lost cufflink. Just find it! In the meantime, what can you do? Well, Not On Our Watch says you can “stay informed” and tell your representative that you are concerned. You can give money to relief groups. You can “take a stand.” But once you get beyond the high-school-oral-report rhetoric, you’ll discover that taking a stand means asking the U.N. to adopt a binding resolution to form an ad hoc committee on stand-taking. The U.S. government — run entirely by the group’s fellow liberals — isn’t to be part of the solution at all. Last year, at the U.N. ceremony for Clooney’s anointment as a “Messenger of Peace with a special focus on peacekeeping,” Clooney recounted his most recent visit to Darfur. The people there “see these bright blue hats and they feel a new energy in the air. They feel for the first time that this is the moment that the rest of the world, all the nations united, are stepping in to help them. There is only one chance to get this right. They believe you when you tell them that hope is coming. They know that only the United Nations can help on this scale. They know it, and you know it.”

Of course, whether Clooney knows it or not, this is laughable jackassery. The U.N.’s record of stopping ethnic cleansing and genocide is on par with its record of supporting winning NASCAR teams. That’s why Clinton “illegally” ignored the U.N. to intervene in Kosovo. In 1994, genuinely heroic U.N. blue helmets from Belgium were asked to maintain stability in Rwanda. Ten of them were captured by Hutu soldiers (some reports say they voluntarily handed over their weapons per U.N. guidelines). The Belgian paratroopers were mutilated and tortured to death. After this atrocity, the Belgian blue helmets quickly left Rwanda and the genocide commenced. U.N. failures — of either resolve or ability — can also be catalogued in East Timor and Iraq.

Likewise, there will never be an effective multinational U.N. peacekeeping force in Darfur, not least because the Russians and the Chinese represent two Sudanese vetoes on the Security Council. Indeed, as Mark Steyn noted in 2004, at precisely the moment the Sudanese Janjaweed intensified their slaughter at home, the Sudanese cookie-pushers at Turtle Bay were accepting a three-year stint on the Human Rights Commission (that was before it became a “Council,” by the way — and who among us doubts that the name change will make all the difference in the world?). The first task for the Sudanese “human-rights commissioners”? Denouncing Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, and Israel, Israel, Israel.

The feckless asininity and moral bankruptcy of the U.N. are the best illustration of how confused both the so-called liberal realists and the so-called liberal idealists are. If something is truly morally compelling, if our conscience forces us to take action, who cares whether the U.N. approves? Obviously it’d be nice to get some help, but how is it a moral failing on our part to shoulder more of the burden? A similar argument holds for the realists. The notion that the “international community” has America’s best interests at heart is palpably absurd. According to the Nobel Committee, President Obama won the Peace Prize because “his diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world’s population.” For someone who believes that “citizen of the world” is a serious and legitimate concept, that makes sense. But if you believe that the United States of America is a sovereign entity whose sovereignty rests in its people, and that its leaders have an obligation to be jealous guardians of the American people’s interests, then conducting a foreign policy according to a global opinion poll is nonsense on stilts.

Obama has now said twice — in his two most important foreign-policy speeches, the one in Cairo and the one at the U.N. — that no country “can” or “should” dominate, or impose a system of government on, another. No statement better encapsulates how unidealistic and unrealistic the New Liberalism is. Men should not murder other men, but they most certainly can. The story of international relations has been the story of domination and imposition, often for ill, occasionally for good. Any foreign policy that doesn’t recognize this cannot be called realistic. And, in an important respect, any foreign policy that thinks America has neither the power nor the moral authority to impose its will when our conscience moves us cannot be called usefully idealistic either.

So, again, what use is liberalism on questions of foreign policy, beyond the rah-rah-for-multilateralism stuff? The Taliban throws acid in the faces of little girls trying to learn to read. If conservatives have to be the ones to point that out, what are liberals good for?

In the words of Michael Goldfarb, the Obama Administration officially “certified” the Iranian “election.” Nice.

“He’s the elected leader,” says Obama press secretary Gibbs. Elected? Really? Who elected Ahmadinejad? Does a council of 12 unelected religious clerics with absolute omnipotence over all legislative and judicial ability make an election? Every time the Obama administration attempts to coddle the Iranian theocracy all they do is undercut the will and influence of the Iranians who risk their lives to thwart that illegitimate regime.

Here’s Bret Stephens, and yet another read the whole thing:

Sometimes it takes “South Park” to explain life’s deeper mysteries. Like the logic of the Obama administration’s policy proposals.

Consider the 1998 “Gnomes” episode — possibly surpassing Milton Friedman’s “Free to Choose” as the classic defense of capitalism — in which the children of South Park, Colo., get a lesson in how not to run an enterprise from mysterious little men who go about stealing undergarments from the unsuspecting and collecting them in a huge underground storehouse.

What’s the big idea? The gnomes explain:

“Phase One: Collect underpants.

“Phase Two: ?

“Phase Three: Profit.”

Lest you think there’s a step missing here, that’s the whole point. (“What about Phase Two?” asks one of the kids. “Well,” answers a gnome, “Phase Three is profits!”) This more or less sums up Mr. Obama’s speech last week on Guantanamo, in which the president explained how he intended to dispose of the remaining detainees after both houses of Congress voted overwhelmingly against bringing them to the U.S.

The president’s plan can briefly be described as follows. Phase One: Order Guantanamo closed. Phase Two: ? Phase Three: Close Gitmo!

Granted, this is an abbreviated exegesis of his speech, which did explain how some two-thirds of the detainees will be tried by military commissions or civilian courts, or repatriated to other countries. But on the central question of the 100-odd detainees who can neither be tried in court nor released one searches in vain for an explanation of exactly what the president intends to do.

Now take the administration’s approach to the Middle East. Phase One: Talk to Iran, Syria, whoever. Phase Two: ? Phase Three: Peace!

In this case, the administration seems to think that diplomacy, like aspirin, is something you take two of in the morning to take away the pain. But as Boston University’s Angelo Codevilla notes in his book, “Advice to War Presidents,” diplomacy “can neither create nor change basic intentions, interests, or convictions. . . . To say, ‘We’ve got a problem. Let’s try diplomacy, let’s sit down and talk’ abstracts from the important questions: What will you say? And why should anything you say lead anyone to accommodate you?”

Ditto for Mr. Obama’s approach to nuclear weapons. In a speech last month in Prague, right after North Korea had illegally tested a ballistic missile, Mr. Obama promised a new nonproliferation regime, along with “a structure in place that ensures when any nation [breaks the rules], they will face consequences.” Whereupon the U.N. Security Council promptly failed to muster the votes for a resolution condemning Pyongyang’s launch.

Now Kim Jong Il has tested another nuke, and we’re back at the familiar three-step. Phase One: Propose a “structure.” . . .

It was also in his Prague speech that Mr. Obama repeated his pledge to “confront climate change by ending the world’s dependence on fossil fuels, by tapping the power of new sources of energy like the wind and sun.”

Never mind that neither the wind nor the sun are new sources of energy. It so happens that the U.S. gets about 2.3% of its energy resources from “renewable” resources of the kind the president advocates while fossil fuels account for about 70%. The reason for this, alas, has nothing to do with the greed of the oil majors. But it has much to do with something known as “energy density”: Crude oil has almost three times as much of it as switchgrass, supposedly the Holy Grail of our green future. A related problem is that heat invariably dissipates, meaning that it will always be difficult to turn diffuse sources of energy, like wind, into concentrated ones.

In Gnome-speak, then, Mr. Obama’s energy policy goes something like this: Phase One: Inaugurate the era of “green” energy. Phase Two: Overturn the first and second laws of thermodynamics. Phase Three: Carbon neutrality!

Take any number of Mr. Obama’s other initiatives. Rescue Detroit? Phase One: Set a national mileage standard for passenger cars of 39 miles per gallon and force auto makers to make the kind of cars that drove them to bankruptcy in the first place.

Reduce the deficit? Phase One: Approve $3.5 trillion in government stimulus, and then await the mythical Keynesian multiplier.

Pay for a $1.2 trillion health-care reform? Phase One: scrounge around for about $60 billion in new “sin tax” revenue.

Actually, we can easily guess how Mr. Obama intends to make up the difference on this last item: To wit, by taxing health benefits. Taxes, subsidies funded by taxes, regulations and mandates will also fill in many (though not all) of the other blanks. Underpants gnomes: meet Phase Two. Say, what happened to profits?

BEIRUT — Roxana Saberi, a 31-year-old Iranian-American journalist, was convicted of spying and sentenced to eight years in prison on Saturday by Iran’s Revolutionary Court.

Ms. Saberi, a former American beauty queen, has been in detention in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison since Jan. 31. She was charged with espionage earlier this month and tried this week behind closed doors.

Yes, yes, the Obama administration is “deeply disappointed” and all that jazz, but what do they intend to actually do about it? Nothing. Just like they have no response to Iran’s continued arms proliferation in defiance of their diplospeak and dialogue and engagement and “reset button,” ad infinitum, ad nauseam.

And while debatably true that the Bush administration (or Clinton, or Bush, or Reagan, and certainly Carter) would likewise have no response one must ponder who is the most arrogant of them all — I say the most arrogant are those pollyanna types who thought just replacing Bush with an Apologist in Chief would somehow lead to a different Iran (or North Korea, or South American tinpot dictator, etc.). Instead we’re viewed as weak.

As the Wall Street Journal opined earlier this week, “Goodwill begets an espionage trial.”

We do no favors coddling the world’s autocracies and anti-Democracy militants. Here’s Reuel Marc Gerecht:

Following in the footsteps of the Bush administration, Mr. Obama wants to avoid labeling our enemy in religious terms. References to “Islamic terrorism,” “Islamic radicalism,” or “Islamic extremism” aren’t in his speeches. “Jihad,” too, has been banished from the official lexicon.

But if one visits the religious bookstores near Istanbul’s Covered Bazaar, or mosque libraries of Turkish immigrants in Rotterdam, Brussels or Frankfurt, one can still find a cornucopia of radical Islamist literature. Go into the bookstores of Arab and Pakistani immigrant communities in Europe, or into the literary markets of the Arab world and the Indian subcontinent, and you’ll find an even richer collection of militant Islamism.

Al Qaeda is certainly not a mainstream Muslim group — if it were, we would have had far more terrorist attacks since 9/11. But the ideology that produced al Qaeda isn’t a rivulet in contemporary Muslim thought. It is a wide and deep river. The Obama administration does both Muslims and non-Muslims an enormous disservice by pretending otherwise.

Mark Steyn, funny as usual:

Tom Blumer of Newsbusters notes that in the last 30 days there have been some 2,500 stories featuring Obama and “distractions,” as opposed to about 800 “distractions” for Bush in his entire second term. The sub-headline of the Reuters story suggests the unprecedented pace at which the mountain of distractions is piling up: “First North Korea, Iran — now Somali pirates.”

Er, okay. So the North Korean test is a “distraction,” the Iranian nuclear program is a “distraction,” and the seizure of a U.S.-flagged vessel in international waters is a “distraction.” Maybe it would be easier just to have the official State Department maps reprinted with the Rest of the World relabeled “Distractions.” Oh, to be sure, you could still have occasional oases of presidential photo-opportunities — Buckingham Palace, that square in Prague — but with the land beyond the edge of the Queen’s gardens ominously marked “Here be distractions . . . ”

“Rules must be binding. Violations must be punished. Words must mean something.”

So declared President Obama Sunday in Prague regarding North Korea’s missile launch, which America’s U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice added was a direct violation of U.N. resolutions. At which point, the Security Council spent hours debating its nonresponse, thus proving to nuclear proliferators everywhere that rules aren’t binding, violations won’t be punished, and words of warning mean nothing.

– Wall Street Journal. Read the rest.

There was a time when U.S. Presidents were expected to go overseas and promote the country as a champion of values and ideals. But President Barack Obama has taken mea culpa self-flagellation to new heights with his slight against the Greatest Generation, however inadvertent. Here’s an excerpt from a column by Bret Stephens:

“As the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon,” said the president, “the United States has a moral responsibility to act.”

Now there’s a line to linger over. Implicitly, it suggests that the nuclear challenges we now face from North Korea and Iran all stem from America’s original sin of using atomic bombs to bring World War II to the swiftest possible conclusion. Never mind the estimated one million American and Japanese lives saved as result, or the peace kept and the prosperity built for six decades thereafter under the U.S. nuclear umbrella.

But what should we expect? President Obama is simply mimicking, albeit in a far more subtle way, his Reverend Wright, who said, “We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki,” and “never batted an eye” over it.

Bret Stephens’ notion that we would have lost a million lives without using nuclear weapons isn’t hyperbole either. Indeed, the most dreadful fighting of the Second World War occurred after the fall of Berlin, even when it was obvious that the Japanese were doomed.

The U.S. had 58,000 casualties at Okinawa, just two months before Hiroshima. It had 26,000 casualties at Iwo Jima three months before that, for 84,000 total in the last two battles before the end of the Second World War. There were 1.1 million total U.S. casualties (dead and wounded) in the entire war, which means those last two battles accounted for 7.6% of all U.S. casualties. Of all those battles the U.S. fought in, in two different theaters, just two battles with the Japanese, the last two, accounted for so much. It was a staggering cost, and underscored the Japanese will to fight. One million total casualties for a proposed Operation Downfall? Indeed, that may have been a conservative estimate, and fortunately we didn’t have to find it out.

U.S. presidents shouldn’t apologize for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They should educate the world, and celebrate the decision that saved so many more Japanese and American lives.

A world without nukes? Bill Kristol below writes ‘been there, done that, and it wasn’t so great either.’ But I find it amusing that the liberals only solution to end the abuse of weapons — whether a Glock pistol or an MX missile — is by removing them from those law abiding persons who would use them strictly for self defense. Thus, banning handguns only harms the law abiding citizen, not the criminal who already had no issues with breaking laws; so too an arms control agreement that is only followed by the U.S., never by the former Soviet Union, or Iran, or North Korea, et. al.

In Prague on Sunday, President Obama committed his administration to putting us on a “trajectory” toward “a world without nuclear weapons.”

Of course, we had a world without nuclear weapons not so long ago — say, in 1939. The war that began in that nuclear-free world led to a crash project to develop nuclear weapons. It ended with America’s use of them — something Obama alluded to: “As a nuclear power, as the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon, the United States has a moral responsibility to act.”

It is not clear whether this statement implies disapproval of our use of nuclear weapons in 1945. It’s telling, however, that Obama never referred in his Prague speech to the Second World War. Instead, he called the existence of thousands of nuclear weapons “the most dangerous legacy of the Cold War.” This framework makes it possible to think of the elimination of nuclear weapons as a logical response to the end of that conflict: “Today, the Cold War has disappeared but thousands of those weapons have not.”

Yet to justify a world without nuclear weapons, what Obama would really have to envision is a world without war, or without threats of war. That’s an ancient vision. It’s one reason American presidents have tried to encourage the spread of liberal democracy and responsible regimes around the world.

Of course, there are all kinds of practical things we can do about the nuclear problem — seek agreements to regulate the deployment of nuclear weapons, reduce their number and limit their production, regulate the export of nuclear materials, secure vulnerable nuclear material, and the like. We should pursue such agreements as long as they are sensible, verifiable and enforceable, as long as they promote stability and reduce the risk of war.

But we have a long way to go before achieving a world of pacific liberal regimes. George W. Bush’s hope for a world without tyranny is the necessary — though perhaps still not the sufficient — precondition to a world without nuclear weapons. The danger is that the allure of a world without nuclear weapons can be a distraction — even an excuse for not acting against real nuclear threats.

Consider Obama’s speech. Referring to North Korea, which a few hours earlier had taken a break from six-party talks to test a rocket that could be used for long-range missiles, Obama said: “Now is the time for a strong international response. . . . All nations must come together to build a stronger, global regime. And that’s why we must stand shoulder to shoulder to pressure the North Koreans to change course.”

In other words: We’ll all huff and puff about North Korea, and standing shoulder to shoulder we can pat ourselves on the back for our commitment to a world without nuclear weapons. In the meantime, the United States will do nothing to destroy North Korea’s nuclear or missile capability, or to topple its political regime.

Obama also addressed Iran, saying that country’s “nuclear and ballistic missile activity poses a real threat,” which justifies some (limited) missile defense efforts in Europe. But Obama’s real hope is for dialogue with Iran, in which he will present the regime with “a clear choice”:

“We want Iran to take its rightful place in the community of nations, politically and economically. We will support Iran’s right to peaceful nuclear energy with rigorous inspections. That’s a path that the Islamic Republic can take. Or the government can choose increased isolation, international pressure, and a potential nuclear arms race in the region that will increase insecurity for all.”

Obviously, Obama recommends the first path. But notice what he didn’t do:

He didn’t say that a nuclear-armed Iranian regime is unacceptable. He didn’t express a commitment to preventing such an outcome, or confidence that the United States and international community would prevent such an outcome. He simply suggested that it wouldn’t be optimal for Iran to choose that outcome. And if the rulers of the Islamic republic disagree? In the very speech in which Obama outlined his vision of a world without nuclear weapons, he weakened America’s stand against Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

So while Obama talks of a future without nuclear weapons, the trajectory we are on today is toward a nuclear- and missile-capable North Korea and Iran — and a far more dangerous world.