Thank goodness we have a president who is willing to “listen” to foreign governments, to “create space” for conflict resolution, to break America’s habit of “dictating” to those with whom it disagrees, to invite international institutions to “share” in the process of mitigating the world’s dangers. Without persistent Dr. Phil-diplomacy, we never could have achieved this:

United Nations and Iranian officials have been secretly negotiating a deal to persuade world powers to lift sanctions and allow Tehran to retain the bulk of its nuclear programme in return for co-operation with UN inspectors.

According to a draft document seen by The Times, the 13-point agreement was drawn up in September by Mohamed ElBaradei, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), in an effort to break the stalemate over Iran’s nuclear programme before he stands down at the end of this month.

Forget the cooperation of Russia; forget the cooperation of Iran. The most benign and internationally beloved president in modern history can’t keep the intermediary bodies from secretly plotting against us. It’s useful to keep today’s revelation in mind when people go on about how George W. Bush spurned international bodies or about how the U.S. can’t be the world’s police. Perhaps Obama will get tough on the IAEA and register one of his bone-chilling warnings about his patience not being endless.

There are a slew of synonyms for the kind of popularity Obama has conferred upon America: adoration, affection, favor, and so on. But there is no usable replacement for respect. Respect comes when you draw a line. For this administration, there is no line. The uncooperativeness (forget evil) of bad actors never gets fully recognized. Because there is no line, the administration’s claims of progress are unfalsifiable. That is, they can never be disproved. Everything is endlessly encouraging.

Hey, you can’t blame ElBaradei for wanting to secure his legacy. You know what they say: You can never be too rich, too thin, or have too many Nobel Peace Prizes.

The New York Times is giving Barack Obama high marks for “push[ing] rights with Chinese students.” In Shanghai, Obama was asked via Internet, “Should we be able to use Twitter freely?” Here was the audacious answer:

“Well, first of all, let me say that I have never used Twitter,” he said. “My thumbs are too clumsy to type in things on the phone.”

OK, that wasn’t the audacious answer. That was the “self-effacing” appetizer that whets the appetite for the audacious answer:

“I should be honest, as president of the United States, there are times where I wish information didn’t flow so freely, because then I wouldn’t have to listen to people criticizing me all the time,” he said. But, he added, “because in the United States, information is free, and I have a lot of critics in the United States who can say all kinds of things about me, I actually think that that makes our democracy stronger and it makes me a better leader because it forces me to hear opinions that I don’t want to hear.”

Get it? Twitter should be used freely because Barack Obama manages to bravely endure the free flow of information in the U.S., and that makes him a better leader. Clumsy thumbs and all.

There is an Obama teaching-moment methodology. He has employed it to teach us mortals about America’s founding documents, to teach the International Olympic Committee why it should choose Chicago, and to teach Europeans why the fall of the Berlin Wall was so great: Look at what has worked so well to make me who I am. Follow that road and you shall be set free.

The sad truth is that Obama’s answer (without, of course, a simple “yes” in it) really is an administration high point for human rights. When Hillary Clinton visited China a few months back, she raised the topic only to announce her indifference to it. In other news, China detained dozens of dissidents in advance of Obama’s visit. That Beijing actually believed human-rights activists could move Barack Obama serves to demonstrate the extreme paranoia of the Communist party.

Barack Obama asked that we not “jump to conclusions” about Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, who is alleged to have killed 13 Americans at Fort Hood last Thursday. Forget “jump to.” If only President Obama would crawl toward, or flirt with, or even stumble upon a conclusion, I’d be overjoyed. On this you can rely: Obama will never express a conclusive opinion on last Thursday’s massacre.

Why, after all, would he start there? Iran has rejected our diplomatic overtures in ways big and small, covert and blunt, general and specific, for the entirety of Obama’s term so far, and the president is not ready to jump to any conclusions about a lack of Iranian cooperation. So America’s begging continues apace. Since early September, the White House has been contemplating a troop increase in Afghanistan. On that question the administration has blown past dithering and hit meta-dithering: that is, dithering about when the dithering will be complete. Press coverage no longer speculates about what Obama will actually choose to do in Afghanistan but about when he’ll let us know.

If looming threats of Iranian nukes and lost wars have no effect on the president’s Magic 8-Ball, why on earth would he ever find clarity about a shooting at an Army base? Funnily enough, pondering the case of Maj. Hasan actually demands one of Obama’s favorite tropes — the “false choice.” Two analytic camps have already formed in response to Thursday’s shooting. There are those who maintain that the bloodbath was the fulfillment of Islamist ideology, and there are those calling it a manifestation of mental illness. Since when are the two mutually exclusive? Have we already forgotten that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was both the operational leader of al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia and an authentic sociopath with a penchant for beheadings and the mass slaughter of fellow Muslims? His “mental illness” did not prevent him from nearly extinguishing the entire state of Iraq in a choreographed civil war. Who, after all, are the sworn enemies of reason if not those who exemplify unreason?

Crazy and evil get along just fine, thanks. And history shows they’re on occasional good terms with success. History also shows us the fatal costs of indecision and cowardice.

On October 2, the first day of high-level nuclear talks between the U.S. and Iran, Juan “Nostradamus” Cole wrote on his blog: “Barack Obama pwned Bush-Cheney in one day, and got more concessions from Iran in 7 1/2 hours than the former administration got in 8 years of saber-rattling.”

Did Cole nail it or what? In fact, he nwled it. That evil composite entity “Bush-Cheney” must now be kicking itself for not realizing all it could have gotten from Iran if it had only spent a year apologizing to the mullahs for a 65-year-old coup. Just look at what Obama accomplished: He effectively took the bombing option off the table, undermining any sense of credible American threat in Iran and far beyond. He alienated Iranian democrats. He put Iran on an equal footing with the U.S., France, and Russia for the whole world to see. He strained U.S. relations with England and France by rejecting their policy and rollout approaches to the revelation about the Qom enrichment facility. He undermined the international bodies he supposedly respects by effectively consenting to Iranian enrichment prohibited by international treaties. He turned his back on our Central European allies in a failed bid to get Russia in on a strict sanctions regime, and he proved himself weak and incompetent to the Kremlin.

Did I miss anything? Oh yeah, one small point: Iran will get the bomb.

But it was all worth it, because yesterday Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said, “We are ready to cooperate” with the West. And it’s not like Iran has been saying that for years or anything.

Such formidable “pwnership” is not confined to Iran policy, mind you. Look at today’s international headlines and you’ll see a virtual anthology of American incompetence. Hillary Clinton is in Pakistan catching heat over U.S. drone attacks, while the rest of her administration is back in Washington arguing in favor of more drones and fewer soldiers in the region.

While in Islamabad, Clinton hailed the “historic agreement” that the U.S. forced upon Honduras, enabling self-appointed strongman Manuel Zelaya to subvert his country’s democracy and reclaim the presidency.

This administration is on the wrong side of just about everything. What’s more, there’s not a single Plan B in sight.

What happens when the Ditherer in Chief meets the Supreme Dawdler?

Iran hinted Monday it could agree to ship some low-enriched uranium abroad for processing as reactor fuel as the world awaited its reply on a U.N.-drafted nuclear plan aimed at easing tensions with the West. …

The two-sided scenario presented by [Foreign Minister Manouchehr ] Mottaki appeared part of Iran’s strategy to drag out negotiations over its nuclear program and leave the West guessing about its decision expected later this week.

Good thing there’s not a nuclear-weapons program hanging in the balance.

So Iran’s decision is expected later this week, huh? The anticipation is really too much bear. Although I could have sworn that the deadline for Iran’s response was supposed to be last Friday. You want to have fun? Google the words “Iran” and “deadline.” You’ll come up with headlines like “Iran: There was no IAEA deadline,” “Iran Misses Nuke Deal Deadline,”  “Two-week Iran deadline not set ‘in stone’: State Department,” “Waiting for the deadline on Iran – again” “UK sets Iran deadline to end nuclear bomb work,” “IAEA sets deadline for Iran to suspend nuke program.”

Those last two are from 2004. By my watch, that makes the ayatollahs about five years late. But I’m sure later this week is really the end of the line.

Just to follow up on Jennifer’s post: the New York Times’s David Sanger, apparently filing from an alterate universe, writes about negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program, “The rare public argument under way in Iran about how to deal with the demands suggests that Mr. Obama has already achieved one of the major objectives of his engagement strategy: to force out into the open the splits in the Iranian leadership.”

Two things. First, “rare public argument” has been rendered a misnomer by the fraudulent election of June 12 and the unrest of its aftermath. Iran’s fractured leadership constitutes the central political spectacle in that country. Dissenting clerics are being treated as heretics and criminals by the Ahmadinejad-Basij-Khamenei thugocracy. It is arguably the most closely watched and most important international political upheaval on the world’s radar.

Second, not only has the split in Iranian leadership been public since June 12, but no public figure has done more to minimize the importance of that split than Barack Obama. He views any challenge to the ruling regime as an obstacle to engagement on the nuclear issue. Obama has bent over backward to help Tehran move past the post-election turmoil. As Basij batons cracked Iranian skulls and Basij bullets pierced Iranian hearts, the American president adopted an ameliorating tone, “bearing witness” to murderous injustice and, of course, the political split that lay behind it. Heaven forbid that American opinion be used as a “political football.”

It’s one thing to say Obama’s negotiation bid was worth a shot and, therefore, he was being pragmatic about ignoring the schism in Iran. It’s quite another to say the negotiation’s failure demonstrates that Obama has single-handedly freed the tongues of dissenters in Tehran. While Obama’s poll numbers drop, the adoring press finds more craven ways to rescue its hero. But if we end up on the wrong side of Iranian liberation, don’t expect the people of Iran to buy into the bailout.

Following on Jennifer’s post, and also according to Reuters, “Iran on Friday failed to accept a UN-drafted plan for it to cut a stockpile of nuclear fuel that the West fears could be used for weapons, instead calling for responses to its own proposal.” Thus, Obama’s not-so-revolutionary engagement strategy fizzles in a very ordinary, very Iranian dead end. Tehran was toying with us the whole time. Iran “negotiates” to buy time and legitimacy. It does not negotiate to resolve conflicts with the West. You’d think after 30 years the West would have discovered this much.

Far from it. The collection of breathless commentary about the “big victory” for Obama already undoubtedly at hand is now cringe-inducing. Thomas Barnett has a DOA piece over at Esquire’s website titled “So Iran Caved on the Bomb. What Now?” Yesterday, arms-control expert Peter Crail told the Christian Science Monitor, “At this point, it would be very difficult for Iran to back away from the deal altogether.” But the topper, for my money, was Kevin Sullivan’s attempt to dismiss the “neoconservative panic attacks” with this pearl:

I can’t help but wonder if those screaming of Iranian betrayal have ever had to haggle or negotiate for anything; like a used car, or a raise at work. I have, and I’ve always been told that you never walk in agreeing to the first offer or asking price if you think you can get something more to your liking.

How stunning that after three decades of dealing with a regime that is, at its core, animated by anti-Western sentiment, radical Shiism, a quest for nukes, and underhanded “negotiation,” the best the U.S. can do is see in the ayatollahs a bunch of savvy used-car shoppers. A few years ago, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad spoke before the UN, and afterward he claimed that no one in the audience blinked, so enthralled were they with his divine ability to convey the rightness and sanctity of the Islamic Republic. That’s no less preposterous than the fact that the supposedly incredulous West (governments, experts, and media alike) believed that Iran had suddenly become reasonable and trustworthy because . . . because, why, again?

Oh, that’s right — because we asked it too.

Funny which statements out of Moscow get American media attention. If while clearing his throat, Dmitry Medvedev creates a sound similar to sanctions, the murmur is hailed as a monumental step forward in American-Russian ice-breaking, a quantifiable vindication of both President Obama’s Russian reset policy and his engagement approach to defanging Iran. But what about something like this:

Russia on Thursday said it would continue military cooperation with Iran amid widespread unease in the West over Moscow’s controversial contract to sell advanced anti-aircraft missiles to Tehran.

“The Russian Federation implements and plans to further implement the military-technical cooperation with the Islamic Republic of Iran in strict accordance with existing legislation and its international obligations,” Russia’s Federal Service for Military and Technical Cooperation said.

That’s from Agence France-Presse. This statement of reassurance from our resetees to our engagees has yet to appear in any American report. The lag should give Secretary of State Hillary Clinton some time to whip up another batch of mechanical enthusiasm for our new Russian partners in the face of yet another blow. Remember, when the Kremlin shot her down on Iran sanctions a couple of weeks back, Clinton announced that she felt “very good” about the reset policy. Today’s news will undoubtedly find her ecstatic.

The Obama administration’s protracted share session on an Afghanistan troop buildup is turning into a debacle. The commander in chief looks weak and hapless. With Rahm Emanuel making the case for further dithering as Afghan elections get sorted out, and Robert Gates calling for a decision regardless of Afghan leadership, the president’s lauded “team of rivals” is now fractious and incoherent. He has lost the confidence of our allies. He’s losing (lost?) the confidence of his military and, frankly, at cross purposes with his commanders. Consider this:

“A perception that our resolve is uncertain makes Afghans reluctant to align with us against the insurgents.”  — Gen. Stanley McChrystal, in his submitted assessment of the Afghanistan war

“I’m not interested in just being in Afghanistan for the sake of being in Afghanistan or saving face or, in some way — you know, sending a message that America — is here for — for the duration.” — President Barack Obama, Meet the Press

Mission accomplished.

Obama desperately wants out of this war and is trying to find something, anything, that will allow the U.S. to move past Afghanistan. Raising troop levels and fighting a war until we’re victorious doesn’t comport with his vision of America’s place in the world. If he had his druthers, the U.S. would “bear witness” as the murderous retrograde Taliban surrounded Afghan cities and took absolute control over suffering Afghans. Perhaps a special envoy would be dispatched to Kabul with a failed scheme to bribe opium farmers into growing grapes.

Afghanistan was a useful campaign tool but is now an unsightly leftover from George W. Bush. The problem is that the White House would happily leave with a win or a draw, but try as they might, every quick fix spells defeat. What’s left? Paralysis. How could the president possibly have handled this worse?

Rick and Jennifer, don’t hold your breath waiting for Barack Obama to change his mind and commemorate the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Obama sees it as his job to move us (as in the people of planet Earth) past the “the cleavages of a long gone Cold War.” That’s how he put it in his UN address a few weeks ago.

The Cold War is not merely ancient history to our president; its memory constitutes an obstacle to a “reset” with Russia and to his vision of a mutually collaborative future for all nations. Let’s not dwell on the past — too many skeletons in the imperial closet. A communist world versus a free one, you say? Don’t be so dramatic. Washington and Moscow were the Hatfields and McCoys, fighting so long they forgot what they were fighting about. No need to rub the Kremlin’s face in defeat. Putin might get sore and stop telling us what to do next.

As for Germany and Merkel, Obama covered that at the UN too: “alignments of nations” rooted in that same ancient Cold War “make no sense.” Why give a friendly European democracy the false impression that we’re on its side? What would all the unfriendly autocratic regimes think?

For Obama, the 40th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall presents a spectacular opportunity: to place himself, and America as he sees it, outside the constraints of history, where the important work of Utopianism can be properly undertaken. He wouldn’t miss missing it for the world.

Senators Bob Casey and Sam Brownback are asking Barack Obama to sign the Iran Sanctions Enabling Act into law. The bill, introduced by Casey and Brownback in May, provides a clear and legitimate legal basis for states to divest pension funds from Iran’s energy sector.

Eighteen states have already divested from the Iranian energy sector. But, as the senators explain, doing so means “operating in a legal fog, unsure if the laws will get struck down under the doctrine of federal preemption.” Their bill, if signed into law, lifts that fog.

But the fog surrounding the Obama administration’s Iran strategy is another matter. There is not a single valid reason for Barack Obama not to support this bill. As a senator, he introduced similar legislation alongside Casey and Brownback and was highly critical of Republicans who voted the previous bill down and “put partisanship ahead of our national security and the security of our ally Israel.” On the other hand, as president, Obama has gone out of his way to avoid taking quantifiable steps against Iran. His doctrine of engagement has led him to bend over backward to support the Iranian regime and its “right” to peaceful nuclear energy. Obama’s strategy of knocking Iran off its weaponization course with a fatal barrage of American respect has only given the Iranian regime diplomatic cover behind which the centrifuges continue to spin.

The administration has gotten itself in double trouble with its Russian reset. After failing to gain leverage with Iran, Obama scrapped our Central European missile-defense assets and threw out any leverage regarding Russia, too.

So instead of trying to read the tea leaves to determine what, if anything, the Russians are willing to do on Iran, perhaps we can have the president clarify his own policy. With our long-shot options seeming to vanish before our eyes, it’s long past time for concrete American action. Surely it wouldn’t be too much for Obama to sign the Casey-Brownback bill, would it?

Jen, I disagree slightly with your take on Hillary’s Russian train wreck. I suspect that the Obama administration wants the leverage of tougher sanctions with Iran. The problem is that they now have no leverage with Russia.

All the diplomatic pillow talk about “cooperation” and “encouragement” is cover for Obama’s Russia gambit’s having gone down in flames. Smiling through failure is becoming the default occupation of the Obama State Department, and no one seems more enthused to be at the center of the wreckage than Hillary Clinton. She is pure spin, no success.

There are two looming questions: Will the day come when the Obama administration accepts that doormat power has failed? And if so, how does the U.S. go from being a doormat back to being a global player? As to the first question, reality must intervene at some point, if for no other reason than optics: Obama is keenly aware that he’s starting to look soft even to ardent supporters.

The second question is trickier. Every failed attempt to curry favor through self-debasement puts us further behind the eight ball. We are not merely failing to get the world to act in accordance with our wishes; we are enabling enemies who work against us and forcing former allies to defy us. By the time Obama and Hillary are forced to admit failure, America will have emptied its toolbox, antagonists will be enjoying a golden age of cooperation, and allies will have cynically adjusted to American indifference.

Why would Obama have to do anything to earn the Nobel Peace Prize? Has everyone forgotten how he became president of the United States?

If proof of achievement mattered, John McCain would be in the White House, American troops returning from Iraq could expect coast-to-coast victory parades, and Iran would already be doing something new with the land that had once housed its nuclear facilities.

Today we only deal in make-believe. The Left abhors evidentiary standards. There is global warming in the absence of rising temperature, Israeli war crimes in the absence of unlawful conduct, institutionalized racism in the absence of prejudicial treatment, American imperialism in the absence of empire, and so on.

Seeing what isn’t there is half the job of being on the Left. The other half is changing what isn’t there through costly, intrusive, and ill-conceived initiatives (save 10 percent for keeping Charlie Rangel out of trouble).

One of the defining features of conservatism is that it sees the world as it is. The universal stupefaction over today’s announcement feels like a conservative spasm. At the New York Times’s blog, even Nicholas Kristof wrote that Obama should only get the prize “after he has actually made peace somewhere.” Joe Klein called it “premature to the point of ridiculousness.” Whether or not Obama is embarrassed by the absurdity, one gets the feeling that, for the rest of the country, this was one unearned decoration too far.

The question is: Can a spasm disturb an all-encompassing worldview? When Obama got elected, it was obvious to many that delusion had triumphed in America. Citizens of the U.S. are the most sensible in the Western world. Surely if we had finally fallen for Utopian promises and what Fouad Ajami has called the “politics of charisma,” the rest of the West was already there. But today’s announcement out of Norway struck more or less everyone here as ridiculous — which is an indication that America’s experiment in mass delusion may be coming to an end, even if the president has yet to catch up.

Could there be a clearer indicator of Barack Obama’s significance around the world: Obama makes an unprecedented, no-holds-barred effort before one international organization, the IOC, to obtain something for his country and fails in an immediate and spectacular manner. But after doing absolutely nothing, he wins a prize for himself from another international organization, the Nobel Committee, for insulting his country for nine months.

The prize should be an embarrassment to the Obama administration — a confirmation of what Bill Clinton pointed out on the campaign trail: “This whole thing is the biggest fairy tale I’ve ever seen.”

And getting bigger. The thing about fairy tales is that they are not composed of beauty and elation alone. Fairy tales are marked by diabolism, lurking at every turn. There are villains, poisons, and double-crosses. A great many fairy tales do not have “fairy tale endings.” The ones that end badly do so when naiveté is not just punished but preyed upon by evil, when the protagonist is unwittingly lured right into the monster’s lair.

Congratulations, Mr. President.

Joe Klein has crafted an extremely transparent and sloppy white-washing of the tension between Barack Obama and Gen. Stanley McChrystal. Klein calls it all “smoke and puffery” and explains,

the controversy was all about a comment McChrystal made during the question-and-answer session, when he said a switch from counterinsurgency to a counterterrorism strategy, in which American troops are withdrawn and the war against al-Qaeda is fought mostly with drones and special forces, would be “shortsighted.” A week later, the President said essentially the same thing at a meeting of congressional leaders.

Doubly false. Klein misrepresents both McChrystal’s words and Obama’s and then proceeds to build a Time magazine article out of the double fiction. Here is what McChrystal actually said:

A strategy that does not leave Afghanistan in a stable position is probably a short-sighted strategy.

Not a word about drones and special forces. It’s true that McChrystal was responding to a question that alluded to drone strikes and such in Pakistan. However, in answering the question he moved on to a related but larger point; namely, the one that appears above. Afghanistan must be left in a stable position.

It is Klein’s contention that Obama said “essentially the same thing at a meeting of congressional leaders.”

Okay, when? I’ve read that Obama told lawmakers “that he is not contemplating reducing troop levels in the near term under any scenario.” How does that address the question of leaving Afghanistan a stable or unstable country?

This is no minor issue. And it’s also not an easily reconcilable one. Indications from the Obama administration, in fact, point to the president’s not sharing McChrystal’s opinion on the matter. Consider this exchange from Meet the Press last Sunday. David Gregory played a clip of McChrystal’s comment for U.S. ambassador to the UN Susan Rice and then asked:

GREGORY: Is the president committed to at least not leaving Afghanistan unless it is stable?

MS. RICE: The president is committed to doing what is essential to keep America safe. And obviously we have made important and substantial investments in Afghanistan. We are not talk — nobody’s talking about walking away from Afghanistan.

GREGORY: No, but will the president stay in Afghanistan as long — until it is stable?

MS. RICE: The, the president will do what is necessary to keep America safe. And that relates not only to Afghanistan, but Pakistan, where we face a very serious…

GREGORY: But you won’t commit to staying in Afghanistan until it’s stable?

MS. RICE: We’ll, we’ll commit to staying in Afghanistan as long as it takes to keep America safe, David. We have challenges and threats. . . .

GREGORY: But those could be two different things, right?

MS. RICE: They have–there are challenges and threats that face the United States that come from multiple quarters.

GREGORY: Right. But you can see, those, those could be two different things.

MS. RICE: They may or may not be two different things. I’m not going to prejudge the outcome of this review. It’s a very important step that needs to be taken to ensure that we are not just reacting and operating on autopilot. The president’s responsibility to the American people is to look at circumstances as they evolve, to make a judgment about what is necessary in the current circumstances to ensure that we are doing all that we can to prevent al-Qaeda from being in a position to attack us, whether in–from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Southeast Asia or any of the other places where we have been active and on the offensive against al-Qaeda.

Does Time fact-check? Does Joe Klein care anymore?

James Steinberg, deputy secretary of state, told lawmakers yesterday that the administration will know whether Iran is serious about nuclear diplomacy by the end of this month. As silly as yet another deadline is, I’d take it in a heartbeat — if were to be honored.

The problem is the Obama administration has a near magical ability to stretch the pre-decision phase of any policy challenge into infinity. This president is not indecisive; he’s anti-decisive. It’s as if locking himself into this or that position would leave an intolerable blemish on that façade of satisfied ambivalence that people have thankfully stopped calling a presidential temperament.

Obama has coasted along by declaring every fork in the road a false choice and then walking straight into the middle of nowhere. Even when he’s made choices, he’s been sure to keep the path to indecision clear and accessible. He closed Guantanamo Bay without closing it and ended the Iraq war without ending it. He committed himself to Afghanistan without committing himself to Afghanistan. When he scrapped missile-defense assets in Central Europe, he was quick to point out that he was actually, somehow, doing no such thing. He gave Iran a September deadline to show it was serious about discussing nukes, and when the regime in response sent him a few lunatic pages about paradise on Earth, Obama decided to talk after September anyway.

It’s gotten to the point where an Obama policy decision would be less interesting for its contents than for its having been made at all.

There’s a certain crazy symmetry at work now. For Tehran is also expert at seeming to mull over a point indefinitely. That is how Iranians negotiate: representatives pretend to be forever considering an offer while their centrifuges spin and missiles are assembled. If only Obama’s endless deliberation were as strategic.

Watching Europe’s descent into identity hell:

A French gay soccer team says its members were victims of homophobia when a team of Muslim players refused to play a match against them.

The Paris Foot Gay team says Tuesday it received an e-mail from the Creteil Bebel club canceling a match scheduled for last Sunday.

“Because of the principles of our team, which is a team of devout Muslims, we can’t play against you,” the e-mail said, according to Paris Foot Gay. The e-mail received Saturday said, “Our convictions are much more important than a simple football match.”

The Muslim team is off to find more appropriate hot sweaty men in shorts to chase and bump up against.

The official line out of Tehran is that no deal to process low enriched uranium outside of the country was reached last week during the P5+1 discussions in Geneva. A spokesman for Iran’s Supreme National Security Council gave an exclusive statement to Iran’s Press TV saying that reports of any such agreement are false.

Had the reports been true, the Obama administration would have arguably (some disagree) made significant progress in derailing Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons. But now that an off-site processing deal is officially the breakthrough that wasn’t, the U.S. needs to get serious about putting all options back on the table.

Here’s the good news: We know what doesn’t work. When Obama came to office he said he would restore science to its rightful place. If we look at his protracted Iran engagement gambit as an experiment in conflict-resolution theory, we can learn something from the results: all that university-level talk about showing mutual respect and finding common ground turns into a dangerous debacle outside the classroom. For eight months the president of the United States played doormat to an unhinged anti-democratic, anti-American, anti-Semitic thug with dreams of nuclear apocalypse, only to lose significant ground for the American position.

Obama had supposedly set September as the deadline for Iran to show any willingness to talk about its nuclear program in earnest. The deadline came and went and Obama decided he’d go talk to Tehran anyway. If the lesson of the lost Olympics bid was that you don’t go to a meeting unless you know you’re getting something out of it, that much goes triply for nuclear summitry.

The bad news is that the Obama administration has a weak plan B (ineffective sanctions) and no plan C (military action). Even if turning our backs on Central European missile defense managed to get the Kremlin on board with potential Iran sanctions (and there is no reason to think this is the case), no sanctions regime without China would be effective. China, for its part, is cutting gas-refining deals to help Iran survive sanctions.

As for the military option, Obama’s all-out engagement track has cost us a lot. Fearful that talk of, or preparation for, an air strike on Iran would make the mullahs less likely to give in to his charms, the president seems to have not planned a thing. It is doubtful, given Obama’s ideological inclinations, that he would ever okay such a strike, but had the credible threat been in the air over these eight months, perhaps it would have made Iran less stubborn.

The engagement failure has cost us more than military preparedness. In a futile effort to assure the Tehran regime that we mean it no harm, Obama has ignored the suffering of Iranian democrats. The administration has just cut off funding for the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center. This is a first in the organization’s five years of documenting the torture and assassination of Iranian democrats. “If there is one time that I expected to get funding, this was it,’’ said the organization’s director. But President Obama is only concerned with “bearing witness” to abuses of human rights; not with meddling. With diplomacy a dead letter, sanctions doomed, and military action not even an option, the president will have an opportunity to bare witness as Iran obtains a nuclear weapon during his administration.

Barack Obama’s address to the UN General Assembly was much more than some feel-good, can’t-we-all-get-along pep rally for the multi-culti set. It was a straightforward explication of a worldview that seeks to redefine international relations along frighteningly utopian lines. It is a glimpse into the ideological stew that has produced the dangerous real-world policies toward our one-time allies that we now see unfolding everywhere, from Israel to Poland and the Czech Republic to Honduras. Obama said,

In an era when our destiny is shared, power is no longer a zero sum game. No one nation can or should try to dominate another nation. No world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will succeed. No balance of power among nations will hold. The traditional division between nations of the south and north makes no sense in an interconnected world. Nor do alignments of nations rooted in the cleavages of a long gone Cold War.

Holding up the heaven-on-earth stuff is the logical architecture for an ally-free America. Line by line:

• “In an era when our destiny is shared, power is no longer a zero sum game.” Ideally, there is to be no more competition among nations.
• “No one nation can or should try to dominate another nation.” It follows that there is to be no hierarchy among nations.
• “No world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will succeed.” There is no exceptionalism, American or otherwise. And no nations are to play favorites. That means, among other things, the U.S. will not extend special privileges to democracies or other free societies.
• “No balance of power among nations will hold.” With no competition, no hierarchy, and no favored-nation status, states that have found themselves in a fortunate position as the result of dated rivalries and alliances can no longer be relied upon to impose balance on a region from the outside. (Like all utopian fantasies, this is propped up by a contradiction: balance will exist, but any attempt to maintain or impose that balance will, by definition, constitute a violation of that balance.)
• “The traditional division between nations of the south and north makes no sense in an interconnected world.” There will be no distinctions between developing and developed nations.
• “Nor do alignments of nations rooted in the cleavages of a long gone Cold War.” An incontrovertible renunciation of our long-held alliances.

The next time some democratic leader is woken up in the middle of the night with a phone call from the U.S. State Department telling him that he’s on his own, he would do well to refer back to today’s speech as he scratches his head and tries to figure out what happened to his friends, the Americans.

What a mess. Everyone is electrified by the pervasive racism in the air, yet not one racist statement or action can be pinpointed amid the ambi-directional outrage.

Near misses are everywhere. Serena Williams blows up at a U.S. Open line judge of a different ethnicity. Rapper Kanye West interrupts the award acceptance speech of a white singer only to praise her black competitor. A white teen is beaten up by two black teens on a school bus in Illinois and the mostly black teenage audience cheers.

But those stories, from the worlds of sports, entertainment, and adolescence serve as the collective backdrop for the main near-miss events at the heart of American government. White House “green jobs czar” Van Jones accuses whites of polluting black neighborhoods. A “tea party” demonstration on the Washington Mall draws a massive crowd to protest, among other things, the liberal policies of our mixed-race president. On the same day, many attendees of a black family-reunion convention utilize an adjacent part of the mall (the Washington Post deadpans: “Protesters at the ‘tea party’ protest were mostly white; the reunion crowd was nearly all black”). And of course South Carolina congressman Joe Wilson levels a “You lie!” at the president during a joint session of Congress.

All the above has captivated both the Right and Left, and the topic of racism is now inescapable. Jimmy Carter, Maureen Dowd, and several Democratic lawmakers have labeled passionate criticism of the president simple racial intolerance. Media outlets like the Drudge Report can be relied upon for hourly updates on both the main and peripheral events.

But where’s the scandal? Throughout the 70s, John McEnroe and Ilie Nastase routinely upbraided tennis judges in the most uncivil manner. It was largely appreciated as part of the entertainment. Kanye West’s public record is clearly that of a man-child with an indiscriminate propensity for public rudeness. His latest offense was immediately condemned by virtually all blacks and whites in attendance. Police in Illinois have reversed their initial statement about the school-bus beating being racially motivated. Van Jones’s comment is not racism; it’s what passes as social science among post–World War II liberals of all races today. I personally walked through the tea party and the black-family-reunion event in Washington that day and witnessed not a whiff of racial discrimination in either quarter. In fact, I saw many protesters holding anti-Obama placards happily waiting on food-vendor lines in the reunion area. In order for Joe Wilson’s act of flagrant discourtesy to enter the racism circus, Maureen Down had to invent new lines for the congressman to speak. Jimmy Carter’s wisdom aside, Obama’s personal popularity remains significantly higher than that of his individual policies.

In February, Attorney General Eric Holder gave his first speech before the Justice Department and declared, “Average Americans simply do not talk enough with each other about race.” This, according to Holder, makes us “essentially a nation of cowards.”

O, the courage currently on display! What bravery from Democrats who label dissenters racists. What fortitude behind mega-font headlines blaring “White Student Beaten on School Bus; Crowd Cheers.” We are now talking about racism obsessively—in absence of any racism. This is, one presumes, what Eric Holder wanted. Good for him. As attorney general, he may never get to the bottom of resolving that little Guantánamo thing, but he managed to see the state of public discourse hit the low he had hoped for.

His boss, Barack Obama, is admirably less interested in dwelling on the invisible. In a statement that puts the president at odds with many of his more desperate supporters, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said, “I’m just simply saying that I don’t think the president agrees with (Carter).” And in Obama’s single most likable moment, the president himself simply called Kanye West a “jackass.”

For the past six years, the Democratic line that Afghanistan was the right war and Iraq the wrong one was so ubiquitous it warped not only the national discussion but also the course of history itself. It affected everything from timetables for troop withdrawal to a presidential election that hinged, in large part, on that very proposition and its implications.

With the Obama presidency, America was in essence to move out of Iraq and into Afghanistan. This was to be a long overdue and self-evidently necessary shift—an indication that we were getting serious about fighting terrorism and placing national security over oil deals, missionary fantasies, military-industrial quid pro quo, Israel’s dirty work, George W. Bush’s Oedipal issues, you name it.

For the fundamental failing of George W. Bush’s presidency, according to this argument, is that Bush—all together, in John Kerry’s 2004 monotone—“dropped the ball in Afghanistan” and got distracted from the real fight.

So, how enthused is this crowd now that America has miraculously righted itself and resumed fighting the worthwhile fight in Afghanistan?

Support for the war in Afghanistan is at an all-time low, according to a new national poll.

A CNN/Opinion Research Corp. survey released Tuesday morning indicates that 39 percent of Americans favor the war in Afghanistan, with 58 percent opposed to the mission.

Support is down from 53 percent in April, marking the lowest level since the start of the U.S. military mission in Afghanistan soon after the September 11, 2001, attacks.

The poll suggests that 23 percent of Democrats support the war. That number rises to 39 percent for independents and 62 percent for Republicans.

Twenty-three percent of Democrats? What happened? Isn’t this what they wanted?

Could it be that those who complained about dropping the ball never believed what they were saying? That they only used the line to bash Bush? Is it possible that it was leading Democrats who approached national security dishonestly? That they read the public’s fatigue on Iraq and sought to exploit it for political gains instead of countering it to ensure that America succeeds in all its military endeavors?

Or do they think that the real fight is no longer in Afghanistan? If that’s the case, they need to share with the American people where the central front in the war on terror went. Or maybe they feel that Bush did such a good job in the fight against terrorism that America’s work is done.

Nancy Pelosi put her content-less objection to Afghanistan like this last Thursday: “I don’t think there’s a great deal of support for sending more troops to Afghanistan in the country or in the Congress.” Thanks for tracking the public’s sense of defeat, Madame Speaker. We can always count on you to do that.

The Obama administration’s bullies-first foreign policy is chipping away at all that international adoration for the president who was supposed to restore America’s global standing.

Our democratic friends in Eastern Europe are speaking up:

“Now we see the beginning of indifference,” said Tudo Salajean, a Romanian historian and researcher.

At times, and from some corners, the new mood can even border on hostile. Obama’s approaches to pressing world problems “aren’t worth a moldy onion,” declared Mircea Mihaies, deputy head of the Romanian Cultural Institute.

The metaphor has heartbreaking significance. When generations of your population have known state-imposed hunger, rotten foodstuffs can conjure up palpable misery. It was principled American policy that helped free Eastern Europeans from Soviet oppression, and it’s cowardly American policy that’s now scaring the daylights out of our allies.

Czech and Polish leaders bristle at America’s new ambivalence over a Bush administration plan to base a missile defense shield in the two ex-communist countries. The system, which would put ten interceptor rockets in Poland and a radar in the Czech Republic, had been touted as a strategic way to counter a threat from Iran.

But recently, senior U.S. Defense Department officials said they’re considering other options. The Czech-Polish plan had infuriated Russia, and the Obama administration has been working to improve relations with the Kremlin.

Not just “improve,” and not just the Kremlin. The administration is looking simply to please bullies around the world, whatever the cost to our allies or ideals: in Eastern Europe, we side with an expansionist Kremlin over our democratic friends; in Israel, we add our voice to the lunatic chorus that sees settlement growth as the most pressing issue in the region; in Honduras, we support the bullying Manuel Zelaya in his effort to subvert democracy; in Iran, we flatter murderous theocrats with offers of respect while voters brave batons and bullets in order to be heard.

Not sure moldy onions can make you cry enough for the metaphor to work.

Hillary Clinton has given a lovely gift to Honduran strongman Manuel Zelaya: “the State Department has announced it will cut aid to Honduras, contingent upon the return to office of ousted President Manuel Zelaya, with whom Secretary of State Hillary Clinton met Thursday.”

So we’ll cut off aid to a democratic country in order to punish it for defending its democracy. How many ways, big and small, does this shame the United States?

It vitiates what little enthusiasm President Obama has shown for the promotion of democracy around the globe. Who cares if he said in Ghana that “governments that respect the will of their own people are more prosperous, more stable, and more successful than governments that do not.” He respects the will of the ruler who creates his own self-sustaining rules. The people of Honduras—the third-poorest country in the Western Hemisphere—don’t even get aid. Which makes the policy unusually cruel.

It undoes some of the work of American democracy promotion enacted before President Obama took office. Other peoples are at least as suspicious of our sincerity in promoting democracy as they are of democracy itself. When one American president spends a few years toppling bad regimes and fostering consensual ones only to be followed by a president who does the opposite, all American credibility goes out the window.

The move also puts us shoulder to shoulder with Zelaya’s ally, Hugo Chavez. This on the very same day that anti-Chavez protests are scheduled around the world.

It broadcasts a disheartening set of American priorities. Honduras requires a full cut off of aid. But a soon-to-be nuclear Iran? An extended hand.

It is destined to backfire. Currying favor with Latin American strongmen will only embolden an autocratic regional tendency and encourage more brazen anti-democratic and even rogue activity. Caracas and Tehran cooperate on everything from intelligence to energy. We are trying to shrink Iran’s dominion while bolstering one of its favored partners.

We’re no longer merely apologizing to the bad guys; we’re encouraging them.

Agreed on all points, Pete. I just want to add a note about the conspicuous omission in George Will’s piece. He writes:

Forces should be substantially reduced to serve a comprehensively revised policy: America should do only what can be done from offshore, using intelligence, drones, cruise missiles, airstrikes and small, potent special forces units, concentrating on the porous 1,500-mile border with Pakistan, a nation that actually matters.

Strange that a column calling for a new direction in American policy avoids all discussion of what that direction would mean beyond an immediate reduction in American casualties. Will can’t justify his recommendation within the larger framework of what he used to be comfortable calling the Long War. So he avoids the topic altogether.

His column represents September 10 thinking, only worse. On September 10, we thought doing “only what can be done from offshore” was keeping us safe. Today we know how insufficient were our measures. On September 10, we thought a handful of special ops could mind a border that runs nearly half the lateral distance of the United States. Today we know that that terrain is endlessly accommodating to vast enemy armies. On September 10, we thought a monochromatic wasteland like Afghanistan didn’t “matter.” Today we know better.

Or we did, until the fighting got harder.

Bill Clinton decided that Somalia didn’t matter in 1993 after two U.S. helicopters were shot down and 18 American soldiers were killed there by militia fighters. In George Will’s sense of “mattering,” Clinton was right. As Will points out, “The Brookings Institution ranks Somalia as the only nation with a weaker state” than Afghanistan. But the Somali militia fighters were training with al-Qaeda, and when we decided to “do only what can be done from offshore,” al-Qaeda knew they had us. They saw no downside in drawing America into a long, messy war, as American leaders would always decide that inhospitable lands with determined fighters don’t matter.

It has only been the rejection of this failed calculus that’s enabled us to get the upper hand against terrorists. If we now knowingly decide that the costs of victory aren’t worth victory itself, then we will have done ourselves in through an unprecedented brand of national decadence.

Barack Obama has so ably repaired the once frayed ties with our Bush-abused allies that UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown couldn’t do us the minute favor of keeping the convicted mass murderer of American citizens from being sprung and delivered into a Libyan hero’s welcome.

Hillary Clinton has been so levelheaded (so nonideological) in her pursuit of improved relations with Libya that Muammar Qaddafi simply had to meet terrorist Abdel Basset al-Megrahi at the airport to hug and kiss him and proclaim his love for both the killer and the British Crown before the world.

This is what all that goodwill and all those apologies have reaped? The unprecedented coupling of our best friend with one of our worst enemies?

And considering that this was all probably orchestrated in the interest of opening up British-Libya oil ties, the old nugget “blood for oil” seems particularly apt.

Hey, the important thing is: no more cowboy diplomacy, right? No more go-it-alone, unilateral, with-us-or-against-us, good-and-evil hooey. That was for simpletons. We’re in the hands of geniuses now.

So there’s no need for us mere mortals to get wee-weed up. The amount of gray matter that’s gone into this exquisitely calibrated foreign policy is beyond the grasp of regular folks like you and me. President Obama and Hillary Clinton have Qaddafi exactly where they want him. And Gordon Brown—you thought Tony Blair was Bush’s poodle? The same goes for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, of course, and Kim Jong-il, not to mention all Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Remember, we became universally adored last November 4. If you’re not feeling the love yet, you’re just being ideologically rigid.

Smart power knows no ideology. Smart power, recall, is about approaching the proper problem at the proper moment with the proper tool. So look to the geniuses: the moment is now, the problem is our evaporating grasp on world affairs, and the selected tool? A little vacation time on the beach.