On Open Hands and Closed-Fisting

Needless to say, November has not been a banner month for posting this year. Tonight won't be making any significant dents in that.

However, I didn't want to let this post from Commentary magazine's blog, "Contentions" go un-linked. In it , Max Boot reflects on the altogether ineffectual approach of the Obama administration (the phrase still makes me cringe) toward the Mullahs of Iran, viz their nuclear program.

Obama’s efforts at glad-handing have been interpreted, correctly, as evidence of American weakness and a further spur to nuclear development. Khameini and Ahmadinejad & Co. aren’t even bothering to be polite as they brush aside offers, such as the one to export their uranium for enrichment abroad. They wear their contempt for the West quite openly because they are not afraid of suffering any repercussions.

Boot argues that the naive and toothless approach of this administration toward the Iranian threat has --as Liberal Utopian fantasies so consistently do-- only served to increase the probability of armed conflict by emboldening those for whom polite conversation offers nothing so much as the opportunity to arm for a chance at the dominance which they see as having been unilaterally ceded. I've said it before, and I'll say it again, When you take force off the table, you invite others to take the table by force.

It is a lesson which this administration seems hell-bent on learning the very, very hard way.