Article slams Obama’s appeasement of Iran

Extracts from a Washington Times article
With more than 30 years on the House of Representatives’ Foreign Affairs Committee, I have watched American presidents handle foreign-policy crises from the Cuban Missile Crisis to the Iran hostage standoff to Ronald Reagan’s stare-down of the Soviet Union.
However, I have never been more frightened for the fate of the world than I am today because of the amateurishness of the Obama White House.
President Obama and his advisers have a dangerous tendency to view world affairs through the prism of a textbook. They see what they would like to see not reality.
This worldview served them badly in Libya and cost four Americans their lives. It is serving them badly in Egypt, which is on the brink of either civil war or a military dictatorship.
It served them badly in Syria, costing us significant international prestige and clout.
Mr. Obama and his team have squandered the hard-won security gains in Iraq, which may be sliding backward into anarchy and civil war.
However, all these foreign-policy blunders pale in comparison to the disastrous course the president is charting with Iran.
The interim nuclear agreement with Iran, which is currently the subject of a new round of negotiations in Vienna, is a historic mistake. By every measure, Iran is a bad actor.
First, Iran is still a state sponsor of terrorism. In early January, Bahraini authorities foiled an attempt to smuggle explosives and arms into their country.
 According to published reports, the smuggled munitions included anti-personnel and armor-piercing explosives, as well as 50 Iranian-made hand bombs.
Iran has been trying to destabilize Bahrain for years, in part because Bahrain is home to the U.S. 5th Fleet.
 If Bahrain falls into chaos, it will make it very hard for the 5th Fleet to continue to operate from Bahraini ports.
A withdrawal of U.S. forces from the Persian Gulf would certainly benefit Iran.
Second, Iran has repeatedly ignored U.S. and United Nations demands to curtail the nuclear development needed to build weapons of mass destruction.
Instead, Iran has been caught several times cheating or building secret nuclear sites. Iran’s Natanz and Fordow nuclear-fuel enrichment plants were both built in secret.
In May 2011, the International Atomic Energy Agency warned of Iranian efforts “involving the removal of the conventional high-explosive payload from the warhead of the Shahab-3 missile and replacing it with a spherical nuclear payload.”
Why would a country that is not trying to build a nuclear bomb even try to fit a nuclear payload onto a missile?
Based on Iran’s history of lies, deception and hostility, why should we believe they are playing square now?
Giving Iran $7 billion in cash while leaving in place one of the most sophisticated enrichment programs in the world is not an act of good faith, it is an act of appeasement.