President Barack Obama's vow to reassess U.S.-Israeli relations after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's campaign remarks about a Palestinian state showcases his badly skewed views of Israel, its conflict with the Palestinians, its Arab neighbors and the true sources of regional instability.
From today's diary entry of Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei:
Ah, the Americans. When it comes to our nuclear weapons program, they leave us with only good choices!
On the one hand, I can drag out the talks beyond this month's latest deadline because the desperate Americans certainly will agree to keep talking. That's how we went from the six-month interim deal in November 2013, through a deadline in July 2014, and then through another deadline in November 2014.
Desperately pursuing a nuclear deal with Iran, scrapping old positions and offering new concessions at a mind-boggling pace, the Obama administration has lost sight of what this regime represents and why the United States and its allies have focused on its nuclear program to begin with.
"First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out - because I was not a Socialist," German pastor Martin Niemoller famously observed about his nation's intellectuals during the Nazi rise to power. "Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out - because I was not a Trade Unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out - because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me - and there was no one left to speak for me."
As talks between U.S.-led global negotiators and Iran over its nuclear program resume this week in Geneva, the most welcome shift on the Iranian nuclear front may be occurring thousands of miles away in Washington.