Iran’s six-month reprieve

By Jennifer J. Foster

President Obama hosted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu this week in the first official meeting between the two leaders.

While talk focused—as it always does—on how to advance the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians, the two leaders spent a good bit of time discussing Iran and the country’s nuclear aspirations.

Netanyahu is a hawk. He doesn’t have much patience, understandably, for leaders who call his country a “rotting corpse.“

President Obama wants to strike a new diplomatic tone with Iran; even casual political observers are familiar with Obama’s oft-repeated phrase that “tough, direct diplomacy” “at a time and place of my choosing” may produce different, better, results for the West.

David Paul Kuhn of RealClearPolitics offers this excellent overview of the tightrope walking involved with the leaders’ differing perspectives on Iran:

Netanyahu, as I wrote about this morning, believes Israel can only hold off strikes for months, not years. Obama requires time to see whether his olive branch towards Iran bears, well, olives. Yet Obama’s recognition that diplomatic progress must occur this year was tantamount to affirmation of Israel’s concern, that the threat of a nuclear Iran requires immediate resolution.

Any military strike on Iran is complex, to understate the point. Israel would have to know where to hit and strike hard enough to make the hit count. Netanyahu believes that, absent diplomatic progress by the United States, he may have to risk the repercussions of a military strike. Those repercussions could include a regional war. And Netanyahu, having lost power once by losing the favor of an American president, hardly wants to repeat his mistake. But Netanyahu views Iran in dire terms. At some point, Netanyahu indicates, time for talk runs out.

That “time” Bevan references? It’s six months, by Obama’s own estimates. From The New York Times:

President Obama said Monday that he expected to know by the end of the year whether Iran was making “a good-faith effort to resolve differences” in talks aimed at ending its nuclear program, signaling to Israel as well as Iran that his willingness to engage in diplomacy over the issue has its limits ...

Mr. Obama added that he intended to “gauge and do a reassessment by the end of the year” on whether the diplomatic approach was producing results. …He said he expected international talks with Iran, involving six nations including the United States, to begin shortly after the Iranian elections in June, with the possibility of “direct talks” between the United States and Iran after that.

Um, just one problem with that. Obama’s remarks followed by 11 days the release of a report by the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee that says that Iran could have nukes within ... six months. From CNN.com:

The staff report of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee says efforts so far to stop Iran’s nuclear program have failed and that the real status of Iran’s nuclear program is unknown.

“There is no sign that Iran’s leaders have ordered up a bomb. But unclassified interviews conducted by a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff make clear that Iran has moved closer to completing the three components for a nuclear weapon-fissile material, warhead design and delivery system,“ the report says.

“... A foreign intelligence agency and some U.N. officials estimated that Iran could reconfigure its centrifuge cascades and produce enough weapons-grade material for a bomb within six months ... The fact that it has enriched a significant quantity of reactor-grade uranium gives Iran the option of moving quickly if its leaders make a political decision to build a bomb. And even if Iran’s current leaders do not proceed, the decision is inherently reversible as long as it retains its enrichment capability.“

Addressing those concerns, Obama said Monday that “we’re not going to have talks forever,“ and “We’re not going to create a situation in which talks become an excuse for inaction while Iran proceeds.”

Really? Well, two days after Obama made those statements in his appearance with Netanyahu, Iran test-fired a missile capable of reaching Israel, U.S. Mideast bases and Europe.

Maybe Iran just needs more exposure to Obama’s “tough, direct diplomacy.“

The president is right: He’s not going to create the situation in which talks become an excuse for inaction while Iran proceeds. It already exists. He’s just continuing it by giving Iran another six-month reprieve—and advertising that reprieve to the world.

No, we won’t have talks forever. All the signs are that we’ll have a nuclear showdown, instead.

Awesome.

General—er, Uncle Sam Motors?

By Jennifer J. Foster

As the bankruptcy noose tightens around General Motors, pundits of all stripes are considering the impact of the federal government taking over such a large stake in the American automobile industry.

GOP pundit Rich Galen has an interesting column today from the anti-Uncle-Sam-Motors perspective. Galen argues that whatever the economic underpinnings of the decision, it could produce good political results for Republicans:

Actually, this might be a good thing for Republicans. When a faceless corporation—or worse yet—a faceless and heartless bankruptcy court—closes down thousands of dealerships in thousands of towns, it’s hard to know where to aim your ire.

When the support for the local Jaycees, or the high school cheerleaders, or local churches, or any other of the dozens of local charities and organizations which benefit from help that car dealerships provide in the way of advertising, donations, and being a local community’s best corporate citizen vanishes; to whom do you send the angry e-mail?

Now we know. The Owner: Barack Obama.

What do you think—will GM’s bankruptcy and government takeover have political consequences for the president? Or will voters accept it as part of the remaking of the American economy?

You can read the rest of Galen’s column here.

Personal irritation alert

By Jennifer J. Foster

There is little that is more irritating to a writer seeking syndication than a syndicated writer who pulls something stupid—something, such as, what Maureen Dowd did this weekend.

According to the Associated Press:

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd has admitted to using a paragraph virtually word-for-word from a prominent liberal blogger without attribution.

Dowd acknowledged the error in an e-mail to The Huffington Post on Sunday, the Web site reported. The Times corrected her column online to give proper credit for the material to Talking Points Memo editor Josh Marshall.

Dowd says it was an honest mistake, according to the AP, that she “never read Marshall’s post last week and had heard the line from a friend who did not mention reading it in Marshall’s blog.“

So ... if that’s true, the friend from whom Dowd heard the line would have had to have remembered the sentence verbatim, and then Dowd would have had to have written it verbatim in her column.

Either that, or the fact that her version differed from Marshall’s by only two words was a complete coincidence.

You decide.

I don’t have a problem with Maureen Dowd generally. She’s a liberal columnist, so I don’t agree with her often. But I have plugged her here before, most recently when she wrote a column about the impact the San Francisco Chronicle has had on the city, its history and its politics.

But you know, this isn’t rocket science. Either what you write is your own stuff, or it isn’t.

This wasn’t.

To my knowledge, this is the first time Dowd has had a problem of this nature. So I hope she’s learned her lesson and she will take care to avoid a similarly embarrassing hit on her credibility in the future.

Obama at Notre Dame

By Jennifer J. Foster

All the buzz this weekend was about President Obama’s appearance at Notre Dame.

As you know, I had high praise for Obama’s first commencement address, delivered to graduates of Arizona State University on Wednesday night. I was interested to see what the president would do in the Notre Dame situation, and if he would use the debate over abortion as the springboard for his speech, as he had done with the debate over his honorary degree at ASU.

He did.

If you missed the address, you can watch it here (it’s in three parts) or read the transcript here.

My take on the speech was that it offered nothing new. While Obama always says the right things about bringing people with differing viewpoints together on this issue, he has no credibility as far as taking steps to recognize and respect those differing points of view. He has had several chances already in his young presidency to strike a more moderate tone on the abortion issue, but at every turn, he has taken a liberal stance. Choosing Kathleen Sebelius to lead the Department of Health and Human Services is but one example.

NPR reported in advance of Obama’s Notre Dame speech that although the president has brought together folks on opposite sides of this debate to try to find areas where they can agree, these efforts have largely gone underreported or unreported at all. As a result, they’ve gone almost completely unnoticed.

Why? If this is President Obama’s good-faith effort to try to help people find common ground on a difficult issue—perhaps the most difficult issue—facing this country, why isn’t he doing it publicly?

And why didn’t he mention those efforts in his speech at Notre Dame?

The bottom line, for me, is this: President Obama talks a good game on taking a moderate poosition on abortion, and his speech Sunday was no exception to that M.O. But the record shows that his record doesn’t match his rhetoric.

Looking forward, we’ll have more opportunities to see whether the president is interested in truly staking out a moderate abortion position that upholds his beliefs about it without disrespecting those with whom he disagrees. The foremost example of this, of course, is the looming Supreme Court nomination. We will be able to tell a lot—a lot—about Obama’s approach with his pick. But also on the horizon is another look at the Hyde Amendment, a longstanding congressional provision that forbids Medicaid funds from being used for abortion.

If President Obama seeks to lift the Hyde Amendment, we’ll know that he has no respect at all for American taxpayers who oppose abortion—and we’ll have irrefutable confirmation that, his rhetoric notwithstanding, he has no interest in being a moderate on this issue.

This week’s column: Obama on prisoner abuse photos

By Jennifer J. Foster

If you missed it in Saturday’s edition of the Opelika-Auburn News, my most recent column deals with the implications of President Obama’s decision to fight the release of more photos of military prisoner abuse.

Not only is the decision the right one for the troops, I wrote, but it illustrates that the president is making progress in learning how to navigate military matters.

You can read it here.