O’s Iran Fantasies

The more President Obama promotes his Iran nuclear deal, the worse it looks. As Amir Taheri has reported in The Post, the Iranians started contradicting the White House on one key point after another before the ink was even dry on last week’s press releases.

The starkest contrast is on when sanctions would end. Iran says it’s Day One; Obama claims Tehran will have to prove it’s behaving first. That alone all but guarantees that the “final” talks won’t conclude by the end of June, as Obama insists— and that the administration will once again extend the deadline rather than admit failure.

After all, the first round of talks went a year past his original “hard” deadline.

But it was in his weekend interview with New York Times columnist Tom Friedman that the president most embarrassed himself.

Won’t the Saudis see Iran on the verge of going nuclear— which iswhere the deal unquestionably leaves them— and decide they have to get their own nukes, fast?

The Saudis don’t understand their own interests, Obama “explained.” So? They’re going to act on their understanding, not his. Same with Egypt, and probably the Turks.

The Israelis? They can rest easy, the president asserted, because “if anybody messes with Israel, America will be there.” As Elliott Abrams of the Council on Foreign Relations notes, Iran already is messing with Israel — most obviously via its pawns Hamas and Hezbollah— and Obama’s America isn’t there.

Bottomline: The president doesn’t understand his own allies.

But the real horror is the “Obama Doctrine” that Friedman teases out of the president’s approach to world affairs. It amounts to Obama’s conceit that he can somehow convince America’s enemies to become its friends.

The man is blind to the utter farce of his “Russian reset” — even Moscow’s annexation of Ukraine doesn’t seem to register. He ignores the failure of his outreach to the Muslim Brotherhood. He hasn’t noticed that the Castros refuse to make good on their side of the deal that’s normalizing relations with Cuba.

Obama’s case for his deal boils down to: Trust me, not your lying eyes.

So far, most members of Congress are lying back in the wake of Obama’s PR offensive on the deal. Seems to us he’s giving them all the ammunition they need to do whatever’s necessary to put an immediate end to the president’s Iran deal fantasies.