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Appearing in Paris with the French defense minister on Monday, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates made an announcement to the world that will astonish our friends and embolden our enemies.
"We must still try and find a peaceful way to resolve this issue," Gates said of the never-ending defiance of the free world by Iran's Islamofascist regime as it moves ever closer to becoming a nuclear weapons power.
"The only path that is left to us at this point, it seems to me, is that pressure track," Gates added. "But it will require all of the international community to work together."
Anyone care to hold your breath on that last hope?
After meeting for an hour with French President Nicolas Sarkozy on Monday, Gates and he "agreed that the time has come for the adoption of strong sanctions, in the hope that dialogue will be resumed," a Sarkozy aide said.
The time has come? That must be what passes for black humor in Paris these days. The time for getting tough with the Iranians came years ago.
And anyway, what value does a joint statement from the U.S. and France against Iran have? U.S. diplomats on Monday were putting on a good face about France's decision to send 80 — count 'em — more personnel to help the U.S. with what President Obama has called the central front in the war on al-Qaida in Afghanistan.
Add to that France's plans to send amphibious assault ships to Russia against our wishes, with the rationale that Russia, has "changed deeply" since losing the Cold War, and so it's time to nurture a new relationship.
They might ask the family of the murdered dissident Alexander Litvinenko, poisoned by a radioactive isotope in 2006, how nurturing Russian ruler Vladimir Putin is. Or ask the former Soviet bloc nations seeking missile defense from Russia.
At any rate, something seems to have happened that spoiled all the love and respect our cool, new commander in chief was supposed to be getting from the land of Robespierre, so unlike the treatment afforded that Europhobic Texan predecessor of his.
Think what Tehran thinks when it hears the defense secretary of this and the previous presidency say that the only path left to the world's lone superpower — and, by extension, to the community of civilized nations — is more sanctions.
"The key," Gates said in Paris, "is persuading the Iranian leaders that their long-term best interests are best served by not having nuclear weapons, as opposed to having them. And so I think that an approach along these lines, as long as the international community is seen pressing vigorously to resolve this problem, my hope is we will then be able to keep this in economic and diplomatic channels."
That is a fundamental misunderstanding of what motivates those who rule Iran. The mullahs, the ayatollahs and their henchman who returned to the Iranian presidency in a rigged election last summer see "their long-term best interests" in supernatural terms.
The return of the 12th Imam, the destruction of the Jewish state in an apocalyptic holy war, an eternity spent in that giant brothel in the sky — those things dominate their thoughts, not the effects of economic sanctions or isolation from the international community.
It must be with that reality in mind that we consider what the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad think when the U.S. says, through Gates, that force is not an option.
We have a Western alliance, unallied even on fighting al-Qaida in Afghanistan, which spends years watching a jihadist regime work toward atomic weapons before it even seriously considers anything approaching real economic warfare against it, and which tells its enemies that force is out as a solution.
When a secretary of defense considers defense a nonoption, it's time to
think about (as the president would say) pressing the reset button.