Obama’s Failure to Confront the Iranian Threat

Yesterday, America learned that Iran conspired to launch a terrorist attack in Washington, D.C., with a planned assassination of the Saudi ambassador and bomb attacks on the Saudi and Israeli embassies. U.S. authorities disrupted the plot and have brought charges against the men who planned to carry out the attack, but the audacity of Iran’s actions highlights a disturbing truth: The Obama Administration has done far too little to deter state-sponsored terrorism, and it has utterly failed to confront the Iranian threat.

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Not one month ago, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad stood before the United Nations General Assembly in New York City and delivered a speech rife with hatred of the United States, September 11 conspiracy theories, anti-Semitism, and Holocaust denials. His diatribe at the U.N. has become an annual ritual, but as we learned yesterday, this year’s performance occurred all while Ahmadinejad’s government was seeking to attack the United States–a fact that President Barack Obama was made aware of in June of this year. It is being reported that following the charges against Iran, the Obama Administration is seeking to use the development as leverage to “unite the world” against Iran, with Vice President Biden saying, “That’s the surest way to be able to get results.” Meanwhile, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton remarked that the plot “crosses a line that Iran needs to be held to account for.” Iran, however, crossed the line long ago, be it the country’s rogue pursuit of nuclear weapons, its calls for the eradication of Israel, its support of terrorism, its meddling in Iraq, or its interference with the movement toward democracy in the Middle East. Even without yesterday’s charges, the Obama Administration has had plenty of reason to take the lead on confronting the Iranian threat, but it has utterly failed to do so. More...

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