WarSclerotic

Major American newspapers, observing the new politically correct guidelines of the Obama administration and its various agencies, have become very careful about the use of the word terrorist, and especially careful about attaching the word to anything Islamic or Muslim. Militants attacked the mall in Nairobi last week.

Violence also “broke out” and violent attacks were initiated by militants, insurgents and rebels in the Philippines, Pakistan, Nigeria and Iraq the same weekend. In total, there were about 500 people murdered in the five identified attacks over two days. But fear not, Islamophobes. U.S. President Barack Obama argued just a few months back that the war on terror is over, and we now face a much more modest threat abroad and at home, from the few remaining branches of al-Qaida, and presumably the other practitioners of the over 21,000 terror attacks launched around the world under the banner of Islam since 9/11.

Terrorism is no longer a significant threat and now Mideast peace is also at hand. Syria’s Assad, in particular, is wearing a smile, like Hitler leaving the Munich conference in 1938. Assad seems very content with a resolution passed by the U.N. Security Council by a unanimous vote, designed to peacefully address his regime’s use of chemical weapons in a civil war that has claimed over 100,000 victims in two-plus years of fighting. Obama and his spokespeople argued that Syria came to the table because the U.S. threatened the use of force. But the reality is quite different — Obama got cold feet, and threw the decision on the use of force to Congress, where it faced certain defeat. Then, when the Russians took advantage of a throwaway line from Secretary of State John Kerry on how the Syrians could avoid an attack, Obama rushed to endorse their plan, which guaranteed that Assad remains in power, and the balance of power in the conflict would not change. It is no surprise that Syria is comfortable with the new resolution, since it contains no call for action of any kind should Syria prove unwilling to abide by the terms of the resolution and fails to turn over all of its chemical weapons supplies. If something less than full Syrian cooperation with the disarmament effort occurs, then the U.S. and its European allies can return to the Security Council and attempt to get sanctions or military action approved, a measure certain to be vetoed by Russia and China. Syria, in an initial indication of exactly how forthcoming it will be, appears to have identified barely half of its chemical weapons sites that both Israel and the U.S. believe exist.

The biggest news of the week on the international front is the apparent thaw in American-Iranian relations, after 34 years of a freeze in high-level contacts dating to the Khomeini regime’s takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Teheran and the seizure of hostages in 1979. The Iranian charm offensive, begun after the election of the new so-called moderate leader President Hasan Rouhani, has, to use a metaphor, worked like a charm on the Americans and the international community. That international community, and the pack of foreign policy “realists” and media sycophants, are hungry for evidence that in his second term, our Nobel Peace Prize-winning president, is finally getting around to accomplishing all that the Nobel selection committee envisioned when they decided to give him the prize even before he took office. They too believed that his election, in and of itself would mean that “the world would start healing” and the “oceans would stop rising.” Megalomania never sounded so stirring or had so many adherents.

The Iranian script for the next few months is designed to demonstrate to the West that Rouhani, “the good guy in Iran,” still faces hardline foes at home that he needs to overcome to make a deal with the West on its nuclear program. Some of these “hardliners” greeted him upon his return to Iran, by attempting to throw things at his car while shouting the most popular chants in the country the last three decades: “Death to America,” and “Death to Israel.” The message to the West was clear: If you want any movement from Iran, do not push too hard, and make Rouhani’s job easier by offering some positive gestures — say, like easing some of the sanctions that have actually worked to the point that Iran has been forced to fake a new openness to the U.S. in order to get them removed. Rouhani, of course, is a moderate in the same way that Mahmoud Abbas is a moderate. Abbas wrote a doctoral thesis denying the Holocaust occurred. Rouhani, has advanced from that level. The mastermind of the attacks on the U.S. forces in Beirut in the 1980s has now come around to acknowledging that a “group of Jews” were harmed by the Nazis, as were many others.

If six million dead comprises “a group,” then presumably the few hundred Jews murdered by Hezbollah at Iran’s direction in Argentina, and in Israel, do not even measure on the victim scale.

There is speculation that the Iranian pose of a new moderation and openness to the West has another motive. The Iranians may have calculated that just as the Russians found a way for Obama to stand down from his “red line” on use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime, they too, can provide a face-saver for the president to stand down from a more significant red line — that he will not allow Iran to develop nuclear weapons. In this case, the Iranian strategy will be their time honored one — talks, and more talks with the West, in this case with Kerry, added to the conference room to join the usual contingent of several European emissaries, for a chat-fest that has gone on unproductively for close to a decade. The presence of Kerry at such a meeting serves another Iranian objective, and one that is likely shared by Obama. The president wants to make his own decision about not using force or withdrawing our forces from abroad. He has no interest in unilateral military action, whether by the U.S., or by Israel, to strike at Iran. If the president and his secretary of state are talking on the phone to Rouhani, or in person with his foreign minister, it would be unseemly in American eyes, if an Israeli action against Iran interfered with the peace offensive.

There are certainly well-developed arguments for and against military action against Iran, if nothing else stops their march to the bomb, but a president who fears blowback from an “incredibly small” one- or two-day American operation against Syria, an Iranian ally, has to have a lot more concern about a strike by a third party or by America against Iran itself. It seems likely that Kerry and the president are, as a result, both anxious for some face-saving “solution” that pretends to stop an Iranian nuclear weapons development, while preserving Iranian dignity, and right to develop nuclear power for “peaceful uses.”

With Syria an issue to forget, and Iran an issue that can be soft pedaled, the administration is left with only one active Middle East engagement — creating a Palestinian state. Of course, the president couched the objective in terms of helping Israel:

“Friends of Israel, including the U.S., must recognize that Israel’s security as a Jewish and democratic state depends upon the realization of a Palestinian state.”

After the quick “success” achieved by giving up the fight in Syria, and the hunger seen in responding to the Iranian gestures, the president is undoubtedly emboldened that his new allies — Russia, Iran and Syria — can help achieve Middle East peace and a two-state solution, a concept obviously dear to his new allies, who want nothing more than to see “a Jewish democratic state live side by side in peace and security with a new Palestinian state.”

The last few weeks have seen rapid movements in the president’s international positions. The nation, he believes, is now on a peace footing after a decade of war. But there are still battles to be fought. Terrorists remain out there, though they are not Islamic. White House Senior Advisor Dan Pfeiffer laid out the terror threat this week:

“‘We are for cutting spending. We are for reforming out tax codes, reforming out entitlements,’ Pfeiffer told Jake Tapper. ‘What we’re not for is negotiating with people with a bomb strapped to their chest. We’re not going to do that.'”

The Obama administration seems to think that Republicans are the world’s last remaining terrorists, other than those few al-Qaida stringers and their annoying butchery. Forget the 9/11 attacks. This administration seems more bothered that the sequester is still in effect, and the Republicans are not letting up in demanding the administration backtrack on its unpopular health-care reform — Obamacare. The war the Obama administration has always cared about is at home — increasing the size of government, and its regulatory reach, and paying for it, if at all, with higher taxes on wealthy people. If you want to see some passion from the president, you will see it when he is bashing Republicans for resisting his effort to transform the American economy. Terrorists, of course, deserve no better.