President Hillary at 3AM- God Forbid! Trust me But I will Not Allow You To Verify! GMOA - A Great Ga. Institution - Go Visit! Obama's Enmity Towards Israel Surfacing and Growing!

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With the passing of each day, Obama's antipathy towards Israel both grows and becomes evident.

He seems to  truly believe Israel is the cause of America's problems in the Middle East.

What Obama chooses not to believe is that Israel is the horse in the middle holding up all the rest.  A strong and determined Israel provides some semblance of cover and protection for many of the Arab/Muslim nations threatened by their own radical.(See 1, 1a and 1b below.)
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I am reposting the New York Magazine link  that features GMOA and Athens.  http://nymag.com/travel/weekends/athensgeorgia/index2.html

As you may know, I have been on GMOA's Board of Advisors, for more than two decades and have conducted art tours to GMOA and other Georgia Museums  (Booth Museum of Western Art in Cartersville , Kennesaw Museum on the campus of Kennesaw University in Kennesaw etc.)

GMOA is the State Museum and was begun when a New York attorney was visiting Athens and began taking art courses and lessons from Lamar Dodd.  The attorney, Alfred Holbrook, left 100 of his magnificent painting to the "People of Ga." and  now our collection numbers over 12,000 objects housed in a wonderful museum..

GMOA's reputation as a significant teaching museum has grown and we recently were given three sculpted works by George Segal.  The Brenda and Larry Thompson collection of black artists is also part of our permanent collection as well as a significant amount of Pierre Daura's works.  He was one of the founders of the Catalan School.

We are hosting Caroline Maddox, a senior staff member of GMOA, in late April and have arranged for her to visit several Savannah artists and collectors.

GMOA featured thirty works from  the magnificent collection of Don Kole's African artifacts in its opening show Jan 19- April 14, 2013. Don's collection of metal African artifacts was subsequently featured by Armstrong University, April 2 - May 30, 2014.

I am a strong advocate of Georgia culture.  Yes, we have national sports teams but we also have a lot of unique culture and our emphasis on education is helping reshape our state and enhance its image as just more than a sleepy southern state.  When you think Georgia think of The Savannah Port, Historical Savannah, Ga. Tech and the other magnificent advanced educational institutions and our unique shoreline and outer islands, the growing metropolis of Atlanta and the list is endless.

For more information on GMOA simply go to GMOA.com and should you wish to visit this fine museum I will be happy to arrange a docent accompanies tour.
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When the NYT's dumps on Hillary things are bad.

Golda was an inspirational grand motherly Prime Minister of Israel but she blew it in The Yom Kippur War.

Hillary is also a grand mother now but I fear what would happen at 3 AM were she president.

At 3 AM Obama is still out golfing and that has been bad enough. (See 2 below.)

Queen Bee Hillary is getting stung from all sides because she says trust me but I will not allow you to verify!.(See 2a below.)
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How can it be that King Obama is falwed? (See 3 below.)
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This skit occurred 32 years ago. Prophetic and hilarious? ;
http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=-_cdbByTeNE
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Dick
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1)

Malley’s Rise and Obama’s Blame-Israel Policy

Jonathan S. Tobin | @tobincommentary

03.10.2015 - 5:25 PM

Back in 2008, presidential candidate Barack Obama was being careful about quashing any notion that he was hostile to Israel or friendly to its foes. So when it was revealed that Robert Malley was a foreign-policy advisor to his campaign, he was quickly canned. But Malley, who served in the Clinton administration and then subsequently acted as an apologist for Yasir Arafat, had met with Hamas, and was a persistent critic of Israel’s governments (those led by Labor as well as Likud), is back. Last year, after President Obama was reelected, Malley joined his National Security Council. This week,  we learned that Malley has gotten a promotion and will now head the Middle East desk at the NSC. As much as any of the rumors floating around Washington about the president’s intention to resurrect the dead-in-the-water Middle East peace process, this appointment indicates that the administration is not only determined to make another push but that all the pressure and the inevitable blame for its failure will be placed on Israel.

That a veteran foreign-policy hand that served Bill Clinton would get a job in the Obama administration is hardly a surprise. But Malley is no ordinary ex-Clinton staffer.

As part of the White House staff, Malley joined the president at the 2000 Camp David Summit where then Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak tried, with Clinton’s urging, to bring the conflict to an end. To do so, he offered Palestinian Authority leader Yasir Arafat independence and sovereignty on terms that no previous Israeli government had ever considered. He put on the table terms that would create an independent Palestinian state in Gaza, most of the West Bank, and a share of Jerusalem. But Arafat stunned both Barak and Clinton by saying “no.” He repeated that refusal in the waning days of the Clinton administration in January 2001 even after Barak tried to sweeten the already generous terms. Mahmoud Abbas repeated that refusal when Ehud Olmert offered even better terms in 2008 and again when the Palestinian leader refused to negotiate with current Prime Minister Netanyahu.

Malley understands the reason why the Palestinians refused to make peace. As he admitted  in a New York Times op-ed he wrote with Hussein Agha, Palestinians have never let go of their demand for a “right of return” that is incompatible with Israel’s survival as a Jewish state. That’s why neither Arafat nor Abbas is capable of accepting any peace deal that recognizes the legitimacy of a Jewish state no matter where its borders are drawn.

But the significant thing to remember about this NSC appointment is that in the aftermath of Camp David,  Malley defended Arafat. Bill Clinton has spent the years since that disaster publicly blasting Arafat for saying no to a golden opportunity to make peace and costing him a Nobel Peace Prize in the bargain. Malley thought it was “simplistic” to simply blame Arafat because he believed it wrong to expect any Palestinian leader to simply end the conflict on terms that provide Israeli security or grants legitimacy to a Jewish state. To Malley’s thinking, the fact that Arafat replied to Barak’s unprecedented and generous peace offer with not only a “no,” but also a terrorist war of attrition known as the Second Intifada was understandable if not necessarily commendable.

His record makes it clear that Malley isn’t merely unsympathetic to the Jewish state but that he views the quest for a two-state solution on any basis that could provide for Israel’s long-term survival as something that Western leaders should not try to impose on the Palestinians.

Thus, putting Malley in a position of influence isn’t merely harmful symbolism as was the case with the 2008 campaign. Rather, by putting him in charge of the Middle East desk at the NSC, the administration is ensuring that any effort to promote the peace process will be predicated solely on pressure on Israel to make concessions on security and its rights while the Palestinians will not be expected to do anything.

That doesn’t sound very different from the American role during the collapse of Secretary of State John Kerry’s peace initiative. Despite Abbas blowing up the talks by signing a unity pact with Hamas and ditching the talks to go to the United Nations in violation of the PA’s Oslo commitments to gain recognition for the Palestinians, President Obama still blamed it all on Israel. But now that Malley’s role is even more defined there will be no doubt that U.S. policy will be focused exclusively on pressuring Israel. Rather than it being Israel that lacks real faith in a fair two-state solution, with Malley helping to run our Middle East policy it will be the U.S. that will be undermining the admittedly slim hopes for an end to the conflict.

But Malley’s appointment isn’t merely another indication of the president’s antipathy for Israel’s government. It is also a gesture of contempt for pro-Israel Democrats that defended Obama’s bona fides on Israel in both 2008 and 2012. As the president uses his final two years in office to hammer Israel and further undermines the minimal chances for peace by giving the Palestinians license to stonewall negotiations, those friends of Israel would voted for the president should remember how they were suckered.

Even more importantly, as Americans view the drama of the Middle East over the course of the last 22 months of the Obama presidency, they would do well to remember that in an administration that will be consistently blaming Israel for the lack of peace (whether it is led by Benjamin Netanyahu or Isaac Herzog) the person whispering these conclusions in the president’s ear is the same guy that was offering alibis for a terrorist murderer like Yasir Arafat.

1a)

Supporters of deal are strengthening Iran’s negotiating position By ALAN DERSHOWITZ We can get a better deal, but supporters of a deal must abandon their unhelpful public claims that the current deal is the best we can get.

Despite repeating the mantra that “no deal is better than a bad deal” with Iran, the United States seems to be negotiating on the basis of a belief that the worst possible outcome of the current negotiations is no deal. Many supporters of the deal that is now apparently on the table are arguing that there is no realistic alternative to this deal. That sort of thinking out loud empowers the Iranian negotiators to demand more and compromise less, because they believe—and have been told by American supporters of the deal—that the United States has no alternative but to agree to a deal that is acceptable to the Iranians. A perfect example of this mindset was the Fareed Zakaria Show this past Sunday on CNN. He had a loaded panel of two experts and a journalist favoring the deal and one journalist opposed. This followed Zakaria’s opening essay in favor of the deal. All those in favor made the same point: that this deal is better than no deal, and that any new proposal—say to condition the sunset provision on Iran stopping the export of terrorism and threatening to destroy Israel—is likely to be rejected by Iran, and is therefore, by definition, “irrational” or “unproductive,” because it would result in no deal. The upshot of this position is that Iran essentially gets a veto over any proposal, but the United States does not get to make new proposals. If it were true that this deal is better than no deal, it would follow that any proposed change in this deal that Iran doesn’t like is a non-starter.  That’s why Netanyahu’s reasonable proposal that the sunset provision be conditioned on changes in Iranian actions and words has been poo-pooed by the so called “experts.” They haven’t tried to respond on the merits. Instead they are satisfied to argue that Iran would never accept such conditions, and therefore the proposal should be rejected as a deal breaker.  This is the worst sort of negotiation strategy imaginable: telling the other side that any proposal that is not acceptable to them will be taken off the table, and that any leader who offers it will be attacked as a deal breaker. This approach—attacking Netanyahu without responding to his proposal on their merits—characterizes the approach of the administration and its supporters. We will now never know whether Iran might have accepted a conditional sunset provision because the advocates of the current deal, both inside and outside the administration, have told Iran that if they reject this proposal, it will be withdrawn, because it endanger the deal. What incentive would the Iranians then have to consider this proposal on its merits? None! The current mindset of the deal’s advocates is that the United States needs the deal more than the Iranians do. That is why the United States is constantly leaking reports that the Mullahs may be reluctant to sign even this one-sided deal which has shifted perceptibly in favor of the Iranian position over the past several months. But the truth is that Iran, which is suffering greatly from the combination of sanctions and dropping oil prices, needs this deal—a deal that would end sanctions and allow it unconditionally to develop nuclear weapons within ten years. That doesn’t necessarily mean they will accept it. They may push for even more compromises on the part of the United States. The reality is that we are in a far stronger negotiating positon that advocates of the deal have asserted, but we are negotiating from weakness because we have persuaded the Iranians that we need the deal—any deal—more than they do. Most Israelis seem to be against the current deal, especially the unconditional sunset provision. Author David Grossman, a left-wing dove who is almost always critical of Netanyahu, has accused the United States of “criminal naiveté.” He opposes Netanyahu’s reelection but urges the world to listen to what Netanyahu told Congress. "But what [Netanyahu] says about Iran and the destructive part it is playing in the Middle East cannot and should not be ignored," Grossman said. "Netanyahu is right when he says that according to the emerging deal there is nothing to prevent the Iranians from developing a nuclear bomb once the deal expires in another 10 years, and on this matter there is no difference in Israel between Left and Right." There are considerable differences, however, between the Obama administrations’ negotiating position and the views of most Israelis, Saudis, Emirates, Egyptians and Jordanians—as well as most members of our own Congress. We can get a better deal, but supporters of a deal must abandon their unhelpful public claims that the current deal is the best we can get. 1b)Bibi:  ‘ISIS Would Devour Palestinian State, We Cannot Help Create That’ Bibi sees it, others should: the Two State "Solution" would not only end Israel it would mean the enslavement of the Palestinian Arabs themselves. By: Lori Lowenthal Marcus Whether or not he was publicly forced into stating it, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has now said what most focused Israelis and Israel-watchers have realized for quite some time: the creation of any Palestinian State now, as weak as it is and has been since its leadership began attempting to resemble a functioning state, would be immediately subsumed (or, if you will, “gobbled up”) by ISIS or any of the other Islamic extremist groups in the region. For that reason alone, if not for the myriad others – such as its own leadership’s inclination towards and support for its own version of terrorism – it is impossible for any responsible leader in the region to consider the creation of a Palestinian State any time soon. In the words of the Israeli prime minister regarding the calamitous instability in the region and its impact on whether there should be a Palestinian state anytime soon: “Therefore, there will not be any withdrawals or concessions. The matter is simply irrelevant.” Whether Netanyahu’s hand was forced because of the pressure placed on him by the Religious Zionist party Bayit Yehudi which consistently states it will not hand over any territory to the Arabs, or because a right-wing member of his own Likud party got the ball rolling, the end result is the same. The cat is back in the bag, the Two State “Solution” is now clearly only a solution for ending Israel, and enslaving even the Palestinian Arabs themselves. For the safety of all those living in the land south of Lebanon, west of Syria and Jordan and north of Egypt, the only way to prevent ISIS and its fellow barbarous murderers is for Israel to remain in control of all the borders. The Israeli prime minister began his most recent iteration in his leadership role with a earth-shattering speech at Bar Ilan University. Netanyahu invoked the “Two State” mantra as if it were within reach. In his 2009 speech at Bar-Ilan, Netanyahu said he would recognize a Palestinian State “if we get a guarantee of demilitarization, and if the Palestinians recognize Israel as the Jewish state.” He said, if that were to happen, “we are ready to agree to a real peace agreement, a demilitarized Palestinian state side by side with the Jewish state.” Even after the recent Gaza wars and bruising condemnations of Israeli self-defense by much of the international community, Netanyahu continued speaking, at least in public, of working with the Palestinian Arab leadership towards a result they claim (an idea that much of the international community was pushing very hard) they want: a Palestinian State. Perhaps Netanyahu and his advisers believed that Israeli security is so strong it could even survive the birth of a tiny terror state of Palestine (Palistan?). But inviting ISIS into its own neural network? That would make the recent machete, hammer and automobile terrorism by local Palestinian Arab terrorists look like mere schoolyard spitting contests. Netanyahu’s statement shutting the door on Palestinian statehood came on Sunday, March 8. It came in response to a question about a position taken by the Likud party’s answer to a small Israeli paper’s campaign question. As Lahav Harkov reported in the Jerusalem Post on Sunday, “The article claimed that the Likud’s answer to a question as to its leader’s position on Palestinian statehood was: “The prime minister told the public that the Bar-Ilan speech [in which he advocated a demilitarized Palestinian state] is canceled.” According to Harkov, a Likud spokesperson said party member MK Tzipi Hotovely provided the answer and it was her personal position. But regardless of whose language appeared in the campaign response, Netanyahu later made it clear he would not allow ISIS to fill the vacuum created by a weak Palestinian State.

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2) The Hillary Email Scandal: Who Profits?

By Roger L. Simon

You know the Hillary email scandal is a big deal when you read a half-dozen pieces in the New York Times on the subject— news analysis and op-ed — and not one of them is giving her a halfway decent review for her press conference at the UN Tuesday.  Columnist Frank Bruni is perhaps the most devastating, calling Mrs. Clinton “Mesozoic” — in other words, yesterday’s yesterday’s news.

Things are bad for Hillary and this is before we hear more of Bill and Jeffrey Epstein and Huma’s emails, Saudi donations, missing hard drives  and God know’s what else. I think it’s at least possible at this point that not too many weeks down the road Hillary will suddenly develop “health issues” and not run at all.

So who profits by this?  The cliché goes that the Dems don’t have much of a bench — and that’s true.  In the end Webb or O’Malley may emerge.  I don’t see Warren finally running.  I don’t think anyone would take “Fauxcahontas” seriously in the swing states and the Democrats know it.

But what of the Republicans?  They’re supposed to have this great bench, but I’m not so sure.  The Hillary scandal doesn’t help Jeb, only reminding us that he too is a tad Mesozoic, though not as much as Clinton of course.  Still, it’s enough already of the past.  That doesn’t help  Huckabee or Santorum either, or even Christie.  But what about the man-of-the-hour Scott Walker?  Again, I’m not so sure.  He has a lot going for him, but every day it looks as if 2016 is increasingly a foreign policy election.  And the Hillary scandal — Benghazi, Iran, etc. — only underlines that further, making the commander-in-chief requirement even more important.  I’m not sure Walker fills that role. And Rand is disqualified in a foreign policy election and, to be honest, I don’t think Cruz can win.

So if I were a betting man at this moment — and I’ll probably change my mind, usually do — I’d put my money on Marco Rubio to come to the fore, possibly sooner than we expect. He has that youthful, fresh face feeling as well as genuine foreign policy competence.  Off the cuff, he is the best spoken of any of the Republican candidates.  I know many on the right rejected him over the immigration issue, but he’s corrected course on that one and now emphasizes border security, as he should.  After all, that’s a crucial part of foreign policy right now — protecting our shopping malls from Islamolunatics.

Anyway, feel free to disagree (I know you will) but remember this.  If you’re looking for someone perfect, whatever that means to you, that’s not happening, not from the human race anyway.  Perhaps someone from Alpha Centauri.


2a) Clinton-Alt-Delete

Hillary puts on a 1990s revival show about her private emails.

Hillary Clinton ’s admirers say she’ll run for President in part by invoking the glory days of the 1990s. For a taste of that era, we recommend her brief press conference Tuesday explaining why she had used a private email account as Secretary of State. It had everything nostalgia buffs could want—deleted evidence, blustery evasions, and preposterous explanations that only James Carville could pretend to believe.

In the preposterous category, Mrs. Clinton explained that she preferred a private email account simply as a “convenience” because it allowed her to “carry just one device for my work and for my personal emails instead of two.” We know plenty of people who have two accounts on the same device, and they don’t even have a retinue of aides to help carry their devices.

To allow for such splendid convenience, Mrs. Clinton had to go to the inconvenience of getting her own domain name for this secret email on the day of her confirmation hearing in 2009, and then setting up a system to manage it. Her “one device” excuse reminds us of her explanation from 1993 that she had made a 10,000% killing on cattle futures by reading the Wall Street Journal.

The more likely truth is that she and her husband wanted to control how much of her communications at State would eventually become public—in case, say, she ran for President some day. And sure enough Mrs. Clinton violated State Department policy at the time by not turning over the emails in that private account to the government for its archives. She gave some of them to State only after Congress had requested them as part of the Benghazi probe, and State had none in its possession.

Asked on Tuesday why she didn’t turn over the emails from the start, Mrs. Clinton ducked the question and claimed “I’d be happy to have somebody talk to you about the rules.” She then added a new entry for the Clinton Ethics Pantheon: “I fully complied with every rule that I was governed by.” Just not the policy she was supposed to abide by.

The biggest news Tuesday was Mrs. Clinton’s disclosure that she has since destroyed the rest of the emails that she didn’t turn over to State. These were “personal” business, she averred, and “I didn’t see any reason to keep them.” They were about, you know, things like daughter Chelsea’s wedding, her mother’s funeral, and her “yoga routines,” and “no one wants their personal emails made public.”

Now, that’s what we call convenient. With those emails gone, and her private server off-limits to investigators, no one else will be able to see how much of that “private” business really was private. Though Mrs. Clinton conducted both State business and personal business in her personal account, only she gets to determine what was really personal and what was the business of State.

Mrs. Clinton also asserted that “I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email. There is no classified material.” But the emails between a Secretary of State and others in government don’t have to be classified to be valuable to foreign hackers.

A simple report to the National Security Adviser about a conversation with a foreign head of state, or advice on how to approach a meeting, could be exploited against U.S. interests. If Mrs. Clinton’s email wasn’t hacked, as she insists it wasn’t, she was lucky.

The entire performance raised more questions than it answered, but if the 1990s pattern holds don’t expect any more explanations. The Clinton method is to settle on a defense and then hunker down unless some new information forces her hand. Maybe the emails will show up in a White House bedroom in 2018, like her Rose Law firm billing records once did. But until they do, the stonewall will be the strategy.

Which ought to make Democrats nervous. They’ve convinced themselves that only Mrs. Clinton can save them from a Republican government in 2017. They might want to delete that assumption and think again.

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3)

The Fatal Flaw in Obama’s Dealings With Iran

Taking a collaborative approach to negotiating with bad actors always turns out badly. Better to coerce them.

ENLARGE

PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES

By 

DOUGLAS J. FEITH

March 10, 2015 7:06 p.m. ET

601 COMMENTS

‘Extraordinarily reasonable,” President Obama called it in an interview aired on Sunday, referring to the multiparty deal being negotiated on Iran’s nuclear-weapons program. When the talks began, Mr. Obama said it was “unacceptable” for Iran to acquire nuclear weapons. Now it isn’t clear whether that is actually his view.

On Capitol Hill, distrust of the president is intense, fueled by resentment that he doesn’t intend to submit the nuclear deal for congressional approval. Forty-seven Republican senators on Monday sent a letter to Tehran explaining that a future U.S. president or Congress could easily revoke an agreement not validated by this Congress. Mr. Obama responded testily, accusing the signers of making “common cause with the hard-liners in Iran.”

Under the pending deal, Iran can maintain large nuclear facilities and continue enriching uranium. Mr. Obama says this is fine because Iran would have to allow inspections of specified nuclear sites. In response, also on TV Sunday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, “I do not trust inspections with totalitarian regimes. What I’m suggesting is that you contract Iran’s nuclear program, so there’s less to inspect.”

The key, in Mr. Netanyahu’s view, is to pressure Iran to dismantle major facilities. That way, if Tehran eventually decides to abandon the deal, the regime would have to work much more than a year to produce a nuclear weapon. In addition, Mr. Netanyahu says, sanctions should remain in place until Iran stops threatening its neighbors and supporting terrorism. Mr. Obama says such demands are unrealistic. They would kill the talks, he asserts, and leave only a military option.

But at the heart of the Obama-Netanyahu dispute—and of the president’s clash with Congress—is not diplomacy versus war. It’s the difference between cooperative diplomacy and coercive diplomacy.

By taking a cooperative approach, Mr. Obama insists, the U.S. and others can persuade Iran’s ruling ayatollahs to play by rules that all parties voluntarily accept. In contrast, the coercive option, which Mr. Netanyahu favors, assumes that Iran will remain hostile, dishonest and dangerous. The coercive approach sees Iran’s nuclear program as a symptom of the hostility between Iran and the West, but not as the source of the hostility. Coercion means America and its friends would use trade and financial restrictions, diplomatic isolation and other methods (short of military strikes) to pressure a resistant Iran into changing its behavior.

When Mr. Obama says the Israeli leader has offered “no viable alternative” to the deal being negotiated, he is denying that a coercive option exists. But Mr. Netanyahu’s point is that we can have one if we try. U.S. officials would need to exert leadership by highlighting Iranian threats, prescribing ways to limit them and soliciting other countries’ support.

There are two major problems with Mr. Obama’s cooperative approach. The first is the nature of Iran’s regime. The second is the history of attempts to constrain bad actors through cooperative approaches such as arms control and peace accords.

The Iranian regime is theocratic and revolutionary. It came to power in 1979 on a wave of extremist religious ideology and remains committed to exporting its revolution. Its leaders despise liberalism and democracy. They particularly hate Western respect for the rights of women and homosexuals. The regime remains in power through torture and murder of its domestic critics. It makes frequent use of public executions—the numbers have increased lately even though President Hasan Rouhani is commonly called a reformer.

Abroad, the Iranian regime acts as a rogue. Its agents and terrorist proxies have committed bombings and other murders in countries including France, Argentina, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and Iraq. A U.S. court convicted Iranian agents of plotting in 2011 to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the U.S. by bombing a Washington, D.C., restaurant. Iranian officials foment hatred of the U.S. and Israel and call for the annihilation of both.

Iranian leaders have a long record of shameless dishonesty. Their aid to the tyrannical Assad regime has been massive since the Syrian civil war began, but they routinely deny it. And they make a practice of lying to United Nations weapons inspectors. Commenting on how the inspectors have repeatedly been surprised by what Iran hides, Olli Heinonen, former deputy director-general of the U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency, toldthis newspaper in 2013, “If there is no undeclared installation today . . . it will be the first time in 20 years that Iran doesn’t have one.”

Iran is a bad actor, and history teaches that constraining bad actors through arms control and peace accords is a losing bet. The arms-control approach is to invite bad actors to sign legal agreements. This produces signing ceremonies, where political leaders can act as if there’s nobody here but us peaceable, law-abiding global citizens. The deal makers get to celebrate their accords at least until the bad actors inevitably violate them.

Nazi Germany violated the Versailles Treaty. The Soviet Union violated the Biological Weapons Convention, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, various nuclear-arms treaties and other international agreements. The Palestine Liberation Organization violated the Oslo Accords. North Korea violated the Agreed Framework.

Patterns emerge from this history. When leaders of democratic countries extract promises of good behavior from bad-actor regimes, those democratic leaders reap political rewards. They are hailed as peacemakers. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain was cheered when he returned from Munich in 1938 with “peace in our time.” These leaders have a stake in their deals looking good. When those deals are violated, the “peacemakers” often challenge the evidence. If the evidence is clear, they dismiss the violations as unimportant. When the importance is undeniable, they argue that there aren’t any good options for confronting the violators.

In the end, the bad actors often pay little or nothing for their transgressions. And even if the costs are substantial, they are bearable. Just ask Russia’s Vladimir Putin , or Syria’s Bashar Assad or North Korea’s Kim Jong Un.

The Obama administration has wedded itself to a cooperative policy toward Iran. The White House rejects the coercive approach as not viable. But if Iran violates its deal with us, won’t our response have to be coercive? President Obama insists that his policy is the only realistic one. In doing so, he is showing either that he is naïve and uninformed about the relevant history or that he no longer considers an Iranian nuclear weapon “unacceptable.”

Mr. Feith, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, served as U.S. undersecretary of defense for policy (2001-05) and is the author of “War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism” (Harper, 2008).

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