Administration Policy On Iran Is An Unmitigated Disaster

Published on The New Republic (http://www.tnr.com)

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• Marty Peretz
• March 28, 2010 | 8:49 pm

And it has been that since the beginning of the Obama presidency. Obama had started out with the quaintest belief that soft diplomacy would work with a rough tyranny that had even rougher ambitions in its dealings with other countries. This was obvious to everyone except the president himself. And, of course, his satraps like Hillary Clinton whose rhetoric can never be trusted either as an intellectual proposition or an index of her sincerity.

Only last week madame secretary told AIPAC that we were pursuing "sanctions with bite" (about which talk I blogged twice) but that it was taking time to convince our United Nations "partners" to join us. We were still trying, however. Please!

On the very day I posted the last of these Spines, the Wall Street Journal came out with a detailed dispatch from Vienna, "U.S. Softens Sanction Plan Against Iran," showing that we had already given up the fight.

The U.S. has backed away from pursuing a number of tough measures against Iran in order to win the support from Russia and China for a new United Nations Security Council resolution on sanctions, according to people familiar with the matter.

Among provisions removed from the original draft resolution the U.S. sent to key allies (is this meant to include Russia and China?) last month were sanctions aimed at choking off Tehran's access to international banking services and capital markets, and closing international airspace and waters to Iran's national air cargo and shipping lines ...

What's left in the proposal is a melange of punishments so complex that they would be easy to deter. Only self-deceivers could actually believe that these remaining penalties could actually punish and punish preventively.

That Dr. A'jad has been playing us for fools is beyond doubt. And why shouldn't he have? We were fools and, being fools, our enemies calibrate us as such. Iran itself has announced steps that it has taken to improve its nuclear capacities.

Then, on Sunday, March 28, there was another dense report, this time in the New York Times, showing that "Agencies Suspect Iran Is Planning New Atomic Sites," as a previous story in the Times had proven. The newly reported atomic sites "would defy U.N. wishes." Big surprise.

Actually the news was deliberately leaked by Ali Akbar Salehi, the head of Iran's Atomic Energy Organization, when he told Iranian Student News Agency that the president of the country "had ordered work to begin on two new plants" that "will be build inside mountains." Is this meant as a challenge to the U.S. or as a dare to Israel?

The aforesaid "previous story" about the hidden site at Qom was actually revealed by Obama in September in the hope that the news would evoke international support four more stringent sanctions. It didn't. Russia and China knew already that the president would pull back as, of course, he has.

Those of you who get hysterical about Israel allowing building on a property owned by Jews for decades (and leading to the enormous Mount Scopus campus of the Hebrew University, to a division of the Haddassah Hospital serving primarily Arabs, to the Mount of Olives which is the most sacrosanct Jewish cemetery in the country from which, if you're buried there, you will rise from your grave at the first sighting of the Messiah's coming from the east, and to the grounds of Brigham Young University whose Mormon students are not much liked by their Palestinian neighbors) but are cool as a cuke about Iran's nuclear possessions, well, you are really weird.

The Good Old Days

As some of you may know, I recently became a Senior Vice President at Cove Partners, LLC, a 15 year old investment banking firm located a solid four miles from my present residence and which is run in the main by a really good friend who knows talent when he sees it, or at least figured I could somehow help grow the business, enough to let me have an office and a title where I could go to work every day, which I have been doing since January 29, six days a week, 12 hours a day, regardless of anything.

Note the date of my last writing here - the day of President Obama's state of the union speech and the title to my last piece - "Masterpiece Theater", January 28, in which I concluded at long last that everything was indeed about the money. Politics. Money. Sports. Money. Entertainment. Money. Business. Money. Lawyering. Money. Or should have been, a long time ago. Maybe at some point I'd not only (and said without a hint of arrogance) be the smartest guy in the room, but financially comfortable, too. Enough to give it all away and make a difference in someone's life. Not now. It's war. And I'm treating it as such at this point.

I've never before lived to work, but I am. It's about survival. And survival means work. It's all about the money and doing my damndest to be relevant and a solid contributor at my new position, one in which I am not forced to live by other people's rules and their perversions - the law and other lawyers force you to be someone other than who you really are - where I make my own rules and have to live with them, my only goal to be the best person and businessman I can be, consistent with doing the right thing. I am facing my first solid and real professional challenge in a very, very long time, and it feels really great. I seem to recall my Uncle Bill Cohen telling me when I was about 12 or so that a law degree could be used for a lot of things, and as I recall, Uncle Bill (whom I haven't seen in 30+ years) used his to go to work at a stock brokerage back in the early 70s, which is when my memory tells me was the last time I saw him or my Uncle Jim, both of whom I have great rembrances of and the latter of whom turned me onto The Doors and bore a striking physical resemblance to Ray Manzarek.

As I sit here and study a private placement memorandum and do research on a potential engagement, I've been listening to Slacker Radio's Classsic Radio station. If you haven't found Slacker, check it out. Whoever is responsible for putting together their playlists is a genius. The songs bring me back to high school and before, into the 80s and a bit after, when we all still had the notion that the sky was the limit: that as Americans, we were somehow entitled to believe in the dream that our parents and teachers had sold us along the way. Wasn't that the lesson we got from the free-spending, anything-goes, run-and-gun 80s?




When in a simpler time, when a kid like me from a single-parent household could actually think that he could rise up and be somebody. While it's still true today, it's taking loads of focus forced on us by the crash of 2008. Certainly for this liberal arts major, it's forced me to focus on what truly matters: Love. Mitch. Friends (the ones that come to visit you in the hospital and would, if circumstances forced it, come to visit you in jail) who have become family, and the notion that you better hold on to the love you have in your life. And if you don't have it, the fact that that's the only thing that really means anything. It's believing in what Rabbi Heschel called the ineffable - the magic of wonder at a pink and red sunset, things we would have, in olden days of perceived plenty, felt as if they didn't matter as opposed to those things that lay over the horizon, where the grass was greener, or so we thought. The grass is beautiful right here. Right now. These are indeed the good old days, the days we got kicked in the ass, woke up and had no choice but to figure out what was important and how to express it all.

We are so lucky to have each other to love, those people who care utterly and unconditionally for our welfare: our children, our wives, husbands and those who form the permanent landscape of our lives, whose absence would be devastating. Those without whom you couldn't go on, or don't want to. What else makes sense in this life? Since the disastrous operation and complications in my life of the fall of 2007 into 2008 into the present, I've been forced to consider the absurdity and randomness of life and the fact that there's nothing more important than right now. Hold on to the love you have, because ultimately that is the only thing that can give you true happiness. That and the means to express it. How do you show your love to the people in your life? Do you have true and excellent love in your life? Without it, what exactly is the point of this exercise you call your life?

Pain is certainly educational, isn't it? Listen. It's the truth calling.

Comments are welcome.