The delusion at the core of the patty-cake with Iran

Bret Stephens at the WSJ looks into the glaring chasm between the State Department's view of Iran's participation in these pointless and seemingly endless patty-cake sessions, and those of less agenda-driven observers:

 . . . what are we to make of an American administration that is intent on providing cover for Iran’s coverups? “The IAEA has verified that Iran has complied with its commitments,” Wendy Sherman, the top U.S. nuclear negotiator, testified in July to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “It has done what it promised to do.” John Kerry went one better, telling reporters Monday that “Iran has lived up” to its commitments. 

The statement is false: Yukiya Amano, the director general of the IAEA, complained last week that Iran had “not provided any explanations that enable the Agency to clarify the outstanding practical measures” related to suspected work on weaponization. Since when did trust but verify become whitewash and hornswoggle?

The real reason, behind the confident strides into the negotiating hall, the straightening of the suit coat lapels, the crisp tone of voice, is shameful in the extreme:

The real problem is cowardice. As a matter of politics it cannot acknowledge what, privately, it believes: that a nuclear Iran is undesirable but probably inevitable and hardly catastrophic. As a matter of strategy, it refuses to commit to the only realistic course of action that could accomplish the goal it professes to seek: The elimination of Iran’s nuclear capabilities by a combination of genuinely crippling sanctions and targeted military strikes. 

And so—because the administration lacks the political courage of its real convictions or the martial courage of its fake ones—we are wedded to this sham process of negotiation. “They pretend to pay us; we pretend to work,” went the old joke about labor in the Soviet Union. Just so with these talks. Iranians pretend not to cheat; we pretend not to notice. All that’s left to do is stand back and wait for something to happen. 

That's it.  The thinking is that it's going to happen, so let's rationalize that maybe it won't be so bad. Comparisons with the Cold-War standoff and all that.

We're paying these people our hard-earned tax dollars to squarely face the world as it is, and it turns out, to borrow a term from an unnamed administration official, they're a bunch of chickens---s.