On Hugh Hewitt’s radio show on Tuesday night, Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol said President Barack Obama’s muddled policy on Syria signals that he could accept a nuclear-armed Iran.
“I think next week, [Obama] goes to the U.N. General Assembly, I think he speaks Tuesday morning,” Kristol said. “[President Hassan] Rouhani, the new head of Iran, speaks — the pseudo-head, but the president of Iran speaks Tuesday afternoon. There’s some meeting then about the Iranian nuclear program on Thursday. I believe they’re going to use the Syria template for Iran, and launch negotiations, and make some concessions, and get the Iranians to make some phony concessions, and maybe Putin will help out again.”
“And we will be off to the races on an appeasement that is much more serious, though the Syria thing is bad enough, of Iran,” he continued. “I’m very worried about the next couple of weeks, and I think you could get in a situation where we have long negotiations dragging on, the Iranians quietly moving ahead with a nuclear program while being nice to us, Obama desperate, as he was with Syria, now even more desperate to get a bigger deal with Iran, in a sense.”
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Kristol said what is different between Syria and Iran is that, with the latter, a failure to act could be extraordinarily dangerous to America’s national security.
“You know, some appeasement leads to — little appeasement leads to bigger appeasement,” Kristol said. “The appeasement of Mussolini led to the appeasement of Hitler. I mean, you’ve got a sort of comparable situation in a way, and I’m very worried about this. And I really wish Republicans on the Hill — I’ve been trying to tell them this for the last 24-48 hours — they need to stand up. And especially if they were against supporting the resolution for the use of force in Syria, say look, ‘Syria was a mess, I didn’t think we could quite do anything there, I didn’t trust the President to do it right.’”
“But on Iran, we cannot, this is not a close call,” Kristol continued. “This is not a gray line. This really is a red line for the nation and for the world. I’m very worried that we’re going to see the president start to move those red lines from the U.N. Security Council resolutions, from the previous things he and President Bush have said about what isn’t acceptable for Iran to do, and suddenly, ‘Well, some enrichment’s OK, and let’s talk about that, and maybe the Russians could help store some of the stuff,’ and engage in a big negotiation with the attempt of preventing Israel from doing what it has to do.’”