Support your Friends, trash your enemies

Right.  Saudi Arabia and Iran are in a tiff.  The Saudis just broke off diplomatic relations with Iran.  Saudi is a long time friend of the US, Iran is a long time enemy. 
   So what does Obama do?  Does he back up the Saudis?  No way, he calls for "restraint" on both sides. 
Especially as Iran is a much stronger country than Saudi.  All Saudi has going for it is oil, and the money it brings.  Saudi has no industry to speak of, a minute population,  their national territory is a desert, they have to import everything.  Iran is right next door, the sea in between them is so small as to permit passage in a canoe.
   The Iranians have ten or fifty times the population of Saudi and enough industry to build nukes. And plenty of oil.
    And we expect middle east Arab countries to send troops to defeat ISIS when we won't even back up a long time friend like Saudi?  

Inspections.

Obama's murky deal with Iran does some talking about inspections of Iranian nuclear facilities to report when Iran starts building an atomic bomb.  Apparently we don't get to do no knock inspections. 
But, the question is, should the inspectors catch the Iranian cheating and bomb building, do we, the US, have the stones to do anything about it?  Obama probably doesn't. 
   I have been reading Winston Churchill's "The Gathering Storm".  After WWI the victors disarmed Germany and set up an inspection regime to make sure the Germans didn't cheat.  Well, the Germans did cheat, and when they created a new Army and new Air Force, completely in defiance of the Treaty of Versailles, the French and the British lacked the stones to do anything about it.  The Americans were into isolationism and coping with the Great Depression.  And WWII happened. 
   I fear that only military action will keep the Iranians from the bomb. 

Why cut a deal when you don't trust 'em?

Dunno.  We don't trust the Iranians.  We know they want the bomb, badly.  They have spent a lot of money and time getting as far as they have.  The bomb would make the Iranian regime safe against regime change.  Even the boldest American future leadership would shrink from invading Iran if the Iranians threatened to nuke Jerusalem.  Real people (the kind with brains) have to figure that the Iranians will keep driving for a bomb no matter what kind of deal they sign with Obama.
   So why is Obama so set on a deal?  Especially a bad deal.  Even if the deal holds together for the next two years, it will ruin Obama's historical reputation for ever, if the Iranians produce a nuke right after Obama leaves the presidency.  Obama ought to know this, although sometimes you have to wonder about him. 
   The only way to keep the Iranians from the bomb is to remove all those centrifuges, along with all the uranium in the country.  Anything less is foolishness.  We ought to keep the sanctions on, ratchet them up tighter, until the Iranians turn over the centrifuges.  And we ought to destabilize their regime thru propaganda, aiding internal dissidents, assassination, and other dirty tricks. 

Shopping for boots

Boots to put on the ground that is.  Other than Americans, we have the Iraqi Army, the Kurdish Peshmerga, and some shadowy Syrian rebels.   Our Prez doesn't want to use Americans for political reasons.  The Iraqis haven't fought well since Saddam Hussein's early days.  They put up a good fight during the Iran-Iraq war on the 1980's.  That war lasted 8 or 10 years.  The Iranians had a larger population, a lot of good US equipment left over from the Shah's regime, and a scary level of fanaticism on all levels, from Ayatollah Khomeini right down to the teen age Iranian soldiers who conducted human wave attacks on Iraqi positions.  But when faced with the Americans in 1990 and 2003 they crumped.   Iraqi units didn't fight much, or very hard, and a lot of 'em just deserted under fire.   After a good ten years of rebuilding under American guidance, they aren't even as good they were in 1990.  ISIS was able to brush them aside with ease. 
   The Kurdish Peshmerga fighters have a decent rep.  They fight hard and they don't run.  Trouble is, there aren't all that many of them, and they lack heavy weapons, mortars, artillery, tanks, armored personnel carriers, even trucks and jeeps.  We could help out there, but the  Baghdad government thinks that Kurdistan is still a province of a greater Iraq, and refuses to give  the Kurds any weapons, lest they use them to declare independence from Baghdad.  And Baghdad gets huffy with us when we suggest shipping arms direct into Kurdistan. 
   Then we have the Syrian rebels.  They have little to no rep.  They have been fighting for years to drive out Assad with little success.  They have been able to stay alive, and prevent Assad from offing them all, but that ain't much. 
   And then there are the Iranians.  Lots of 'em, close by, and they have a pretty good rep.  Trouble is, they are bad guys, trying to go nuclear and nobody wants that.  Iran is Shia, and Iraq is split Sunni Shia.  All the Sunni Iraqis would rather die than allow Shia Iranian soldiers into Iraq.
  Bottom line.  There ain't no good boots to put on the ground in Iraq.  (except ours of course).

Obama goes for the deal

TV news reports that a deal was reached with Iran last night.  No details are given.   What ever happened to "open covenants, openly arrived at"?  (One of Woodrow Wilson's 14 points from 100 years ago).   One suspects that the deal isn't that good for us. 
    Oh By the way.   The right to enrich is the right to make nuclear weapons.  Iran lacks any right to enrich, or to have the bomb.