Today Is the Day Hard Reality Slapped President Obama Across the Face

It’s a hell of a day.

We learn that in the nine months since he took office, President Obama has pursued a policy of engagement with Iran, while knowing that they were hiding a secret nuclear facility from the world and cheating a system of international inspections that is supposed to be a key element of preventing dangerous nuclear proliferation.

The Iranians are a brutal and cruel regime, willing to murder their own daughters in the streets to keep power, who think nothing of lying to the world. You cannot will them into being a better regime made up of better people. You cannot talk them out of their natures, you cannot negotiate them out of their ambitions, you cannot haggle them into better characters.

The Washington Post also informs us about the status of Obama’s loud and widely-praised promise to close Guantanamo Bay detention facility within one year.

Today, officials are acknowledging that they will be hard-pressed to meet that goal.

The White House has faltered in part because of the legal, political and diplomatic complexities involved in determining what to do with more than 200 terrorism suspects at the prison. But senior advisers privately acknowledge not devising a concrete plan for where to move the detainees and mishandling Congress.

I remember arguing this issue back and forth with Patrick Appel in January, and I wrote then, “the close-Gitmo crowd doesn't want to bother thinking about the thorny issues of what do you do with the captured terrorists once you've closed that detention center; they just want to feel good about themselves.” He responded by writing about the symbolism of Gitmo, and I concluded by noting “these guys don't want to acknowledge any overestimation of the benefits of closing Guantanamo Bay, and they don't want to acknowledge any underestimation of the risks, costs, and complications of moving them stateside.” Lo and behold, here we are, nine months later, and risks, costs, and complications have made the promise untenable.

The close-Gitmo crowd was, and is, stupid. The we-can-deal-with-Iran crowd was, and is, stupid. They didn't want to see the counter-evidence. They didn't want to think about all the complications, the scenarios where their plans don't work out as planned. They insisted the world operated in a certain way, and we argued otherwise. A man who espouses their views won last year. And now they learn that there aren’t easy and good alternatives to Gitmo, and that the Iranians can’t be trusted. With any luck, this crowd’s weapons-grade refusal to see the hard truths of a difficult and dangerous world won’t get anyone killed.