"It's really absurd,” the [senior unnamed] official said.
"If we were going to cave, I could be home already and I would be a really happy person ... we would have done that a long time ago," the official said.
"Why would we be spending the hours doing this in the way we are if, you know, we were just (going to say to Iran) 'well whatever you want, you got'."
Yeah, I wouldn't want my name associated with that kind of denial, either.
And our diplomats get paid by the hour, I assume. So what else would they do with their time? I hear Switzerland is lovely this time of year.
And of course, if the deal's outline is as I've long assumed--Iran will pretend not to have a nuclear weapons program; and we will pretend to believe them--this is exactly the kind of denial one would expect from our administration, no?
I remember our first deadline for Iran:
The Obama administration and its European allies are setting a target of early October to determine whether engagement with Iran is making progress or should lead to sanctions, said senior officials briefed on the policy.
They also are developing specific benchmarks to gauge Iranian behavior. Those include whether Tehran is willing to let United Nations monitors make snap inspections of Iranian nuclear facilities that are now off-limits, and whether it will agree to a "freeze for freeze" -- halting uranium enrichment in return for holding off on new economic sanctions -- as a precursor to formal negotiations.
The moves are partly driven by concerns in Israel and among Washington's Arab allies that Tehran could drag out negotiations indefinitely while advancing its nuclear program, the officials said.
President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have stressed that U.S. overtures toward Tehran won't be open-ended. The administration is committed to testing Tehran's willingness to cooperate on the nuclear issue and on related efforts to stabilize Afghanistan and Iraq.
The administration officials were still drunk on Hope and Change at that point. Yet when you go from all of those conditions for a deal to our current position that we just want a decent interval of 10 years before Iran gets nuclear weapons--and feel free to build a Persian Empire across the region, you proto-partners, you--it's hard not to call the last 6 years both open-ended overtures and a slow cave.
The question is how much more caving will we do in the last months of the administration?
Remember, we have precedent as well as a president for a pretend deal.
Greece pretended to qualify for membership in the Euro bloc; and the European Union pretended to believe them:
From the beginning, Greece has been in a different category from countries like Italy and Spain. It was a terrible candidate for the common currency, and only ‘met’ the targets by cooking its books. ...
The willingness of European authorities to turn a blind eye to the wholesale chicanery in Athens weakened the common currency and undercut the currency’s credibility among financial market participants from the start.
And more recently, Syria pretended to give up their chemical weapons; and America pretended to believe them:
U.S. intelligence agencies believe there is a strong possibility the Assad regime will use chemical weapons on a large scale as part of a last-ditch effort to protect key Syrian government strongholds if Islamist fighters and other rebels try to overrun them, U.S. officials said. ...
Last year, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad let international inspectors oversee the removal of what President Barack Obama called the regime’s most deadly chemical weapons. The deal averted U.S. airstrikes that would have come in retaliation for an Aug. 21, 2013, sarin-gas attack that killed more than 1,400 people.
Since then, the U.S. officials said, the Assad regime has developed and deployed a new type of chemical bomb filled with chlorine, which Mr. Assad could now decide to use on a larger scale in key areas. U.S. officials also suspect the regime may have squirreled away at least a small reserve of the chemical precursors needed to make nerve agents sarin or VX. Use of those chemicals would raise greater international concerns because they are more deadly than chlorine and were supposed to have been eliminated.
Thank goodness for Kerry's brilliant chemical weapons disarmament plan!
And now we have only the president's judgment standing between us and another faux deal. God help us all.
What's one more fantasy?
UPDATE: President Obama warms up for the Iran cave by caving to the communist Cuban tyranny.
We could have exacted a real price to benefit the Cuban people who have suffered under this tyranny. We didn't.
