http://nypost.com/2015/04/01/its-time-to-go-john-the-never-ending-iran-talks/It’s time to go, John: The never-ending Iran talks
By John Podhoretz
April 1, 2015 | 7:12pm
The only remaining leverage the United States has in negotiations with Iran is the central presence at those negotiations of our secretary of state, John Kerry.
Long after anyone else in the West saw value in the continuation of these discussions, and two days after a deadline that apparently means as much to this administration as the “red line” it drew in Syria, Kerry has insisted on staying in Switzerland.
And staying. And staying.
Please spare a moment’s sympathy, if you can, for Mohammed Zarif, his Iranian counterpart. Sure, he’s the representative of a ghastly theocratic regime, but he’s a person.
Think of it — would you want to spend any more time with John Kerry than is absolutely necessary? Maybe on a boat, because at least if you’re out windsurfing with him you can’t hear him talk over the ocean spray.
Zarif is not windsurfering. He’s in a room. With Kerry. Whom he can hear perfectly.
Kerry is the party guest who wouldn’t leave. Kerry is the customer in the restaurant after closing time who remains sitting at his table while the staff puts the chairs up, turns the lights off in the front and then goes downstairs to change so they can go home — and when they come upstairs he’s still there, John Kerry is, sipping on his flat Pellegrino.
Kerry has morphed into the absurdist movie director Luis Bunuel, whose famous 1962 film “The Exterminating Angel” is about a group of people at a dinner party in Mexico City who find it impossible to leave the dining room in which they have gathered, for weeks and weeks.
In Bunuel’s case, he only wrote and directed “The Exterminating Angel.” Kerry is both writer, director and star of this remake, and his fellow cast members are Zarif and the other diplomats in the so-called P5+1 process whom he has trapped in Lausanne.
Every director needs a studio executive to greenlight his would-be masterpiece, and in this case, the executive in charge of production is President Obama.
Obama is like the executives back in 1980 at United Artists who agreed to make “Heaven’s Gate” and then continued pouring money into it even as it became a bottomless well of expense.
To acknowledge the mistake and cancel the production in the middle would have been to admit a mistake so profound it would have humiliated them beyond measure.
Of course, once the picture was done, they weren’t just humiliated — they were fired, en masse, and United Artists literally went out of business.
Obama won’t be fired, and the United States won’t go out of business. But whatever happens at the end of this negotiation, he and Kerry and the nation they represent will have been humiliated, United-Artists style.
Either they will get a piece of paper of some sort indicating that they have capitulated on nearly every point of contention over these past few weeks, or Kerry will leave Lausanne empty-handed despite willingly assuming almost any position Zarif wanted him to assume.
Which brings up one final, darkly amusing possibility: What if Zarif’s effort in these last few weeks of negotiations was simply to see how much he could get from Kerry even though he doubted there would be a real deal at the end of it?
Consider: Zarif says, “Listen, we have to keep our enrichment capacity at the hardened Natanz site.” This was supposedly a “red line” America could not accept. But Kerry accepted it.
Then Zarif says, “Hey, you know what, we need to keep 6,000 centrifuges.” Again, such a demand was supposed to trigger an American walkout. Instead, Kerry said OK.
Then Zarif says, “Hey, listen, we have to keep our enriched uranium, we’re not going to send it out of the country.” This was the deal-breaker to end all deal-breakers. But it wasn’t. Kerry says fine.
Then Zarif says, “John, listen to me closely. We are going to keep our hardened facility at Fordow. John: We’re keeping Fordow.” Zarif couldn’t have signaled more obviously to Kerry that the Iranians were now simply screwing with his head. And Kerry said: Screw away.
“I am all smiles,” Zarif said yesterday. No wonder.
In the end, having to spend weeks in a room with a fool surely will have proved a small price to pay for the institutional and policy wreckage he has watched Kerry and Obama inflict on the United States.
