That is the title of a Newsweek piece by Michael Hirsh. And to save you the tedium of reading the essay itself, allow me to provide Hirsh’s answer: Yes, Iran’s missile test might trigger hostilities; but if everyone would just listen to Barack Obama already, war can be avoided.
Oh, Hirsh doesn’t actually mention Obama by name. But he concludes the piece with an emphatic endorsement of the necessity of heeding Obama’s call for direct, presidential-level diplomacy with Tehran:
In fact, right now there may be only one way left to stop hostilities: a direct diplomatic overture from Washington to Tehran. Iran has long made clear it wants what any sensible government wants: to negotiate with the power that has the ability to threaten it (the United States), as opposed to dickering with proxy powers that don’t (the Europeans). It’s time to stop playing around with pretend diplomacy.
The problem here is that Hirsh, and the magazine he writes for, appear to be so deep in the tank for Obama that they’re simply inventing facts. What exactly is Hirsh’s evidence that “Iran has long made it clear it wants” direct negotiations with the United States? This is, not to put too fine a point on it, a false statement. But it is one on which Obama’s Iran strategy is premised. Naturally, this false premise has become Newsweek‘s as well.
