The Avis Of Appeasement

If your "partner in peace" won't accept your surrender no matter how many concessions you give up, you know what the Capitulator-In-Chief will do: try harder:

The proposal would have depleted Iran’s stockpile of nuclear fuel below the threshold necessary for making a single nuclear bomb, possibly creating diplomatic breathing room for a broader agreement between Tehran and those worried about its atomic research program.

But according to the diplomat, Iran wants to send its uranium abroad in smaller batches over an undetermined stretch of time rather than the lump transfer by year’s end outlined under the proposal offered by International Atomic Energy Agency chief Mohamed ElBaradei.

Such a change would allow Iran to quickly replenish its stock.

Further disappointing the West, Iran did not submit a formal written response as expected, the diplomat said. Instead, Iran’s envoy to the atomic energy agency, Ali Ashgar Soltanieh, described the offer to ElBaradei.

The mullahs actually telegraphed this latest renegal earlier in the week as a kind of perverse hat tip to Barack Obama telegraphing his pre-emptive approval of Tehran's inevitable perfidy.

Meanwhile, continuing a burgeoning pattern of role-reversal within the Western alliance, it fell to the EUnuchs to eschew diplomatic euphemisms and candidly assess what this latest diplomatic fiasco portends:

A senior European official characterized the Iranian response as “basically a refusal.” The Iranians, he said, want to keep all their lightly enriched uranium in the country until the I.A.E.A. provides the fuel assemblies of fuel for the reactor in Tehran, produced and fabricated from foreign uranium.

Only then do the Iranians say that they would be willing to export their own lightly enriched uranium. “So it’s all virtual,” the official said.

“The key issue is that Iran does not agree to export its lightly enriched uranium,” he said. “That’s not a minor detail. That’s the whole point of the deal.”…

American officials are concerned that the Iranians are planning to run out the clock and continue processing uranium so that they can either build a weapon or attain “breakout capacity,” the ability to build one within a few months. Some diplomats involved in the negotiations are also concerned that Iran may have more nuclear fuel in its stockpile than it has acknowledged, and may indeed already possess breakout capacity.

Meaning, as Eeyore muses, that even if the Iranians had agreed to ElBaradei's deal, it wouldn't have made one jot or tittle of strategic difference.  Indeed, it may have bought them even more time than this in-our-face refusal did.

Not that they need any more time, apart from the question of how many nuclear warheads they want to amass before they dispense with this diplohumiliation and get the nuclear blackmail party started.  If Bush were still president, they probably would have agreed to the deal and then simply ignored it, but having taken the measure of The One already, the mullahs do not believe even that little subterfuge is necessary.

So what will Red Barry do now?  Is Robert Kagan right that "the 'plan' is, in fact, eternal negotiation while they perfect their bombmaking technique"?

Well, duh:

Frustrated by Iran’s continued defiance of demands to come clean on its nuclear program, the Obama administration is leaning toward imposing new sanctions, even if it must act alone.

Administration officials acknowledged growing concern that there may not be international consensus to expand the existing U.N. sanctions, despite Tehran’s apparent rejection of a confidence-building measure proposed by the U.N.’s nuclear watchdog in hopes of making progress on the nuclear issue.

To that end, the administration is quietly supporting legislation in Congress that would give President Barack Obama a broad new array of authority to target Iran’s energy sector by penalizing foreign firms that sell and ship refined petroleum products to Iran. The regime is heavily dependent on gasoline, kerosene and propane imports.

IOW, just like his non-handling of Afghanistan: kick the can down the road as far as possible by outsourcing this timebomb to his Donk myrmidons on the Hill, where it will be buried to subterranean levels on the priority list beneath his domestic communization agenda.  Ensures he doesn't have to make any [GASP] Bush-like decisions and that he has somebody else to point the finger at when things go to hell.  And, in the mean time, he'll have plenty of time to put together a brand new package of concessions to gift to Brother Adolph, in the hopes of getting "the peace process" back on track.

And in the end, he will, you know.  Just not quite the same kind of peace that he intended....