That's the global chain of command in 2015: Ali Khamenei (or Vladimir Putin, or Xi Jinping, or Kim Jong-Un, or the Castro brothers, or Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, etc., etc., etc.), then Barack Obama, then the U.S. Congress. And, in this instance, over something that is toothlessly irrelevant in any case:
Barack Obama says the likelihood is very high that nuclear negotiations with Iran would collapse if Congress moves forward with new sanctions.
Which is the only good and sound reason of which I can conceive for moving forward with new sanctions.
He says he'll veto a sanctions bill if it comes to his desk.
He could get in a lot more golf if he would just have this threat recorded and then all Josh Earnest would have to do is press a button, like the one that spits out his banana before every White House press briefing.
Obama is urging members of Congress including Democrats not to pursue new sanctions while talks are underway. He says there's no good argument for undermining the negotiations.
Other than that these negotiations are and always have been a diplomatic circle-jerk that used to serve no other purpose than to provide endlessly time for the mullahs to develop nuclear weapons, and now provide endless time for the mullahs to construct an ever larger nuclear arsenal. The sooner this farce is collapsed and the fictional pretense of Iran ever voluntarily relinquishing its nuclear ambitions dropped, the better.
"Congress needs to show patience," Obama told a joint news conference with British Prime Minister David Cameron, adding that new sanctions would "jeopardize the possibility of... providing a diplomatic solution to one of the most difficult and long-lasting national security problems that we've faced in a very long time."
A decade and a half through a pair of two-term administrations of both parties isn't "patience" enough?
Stepping back to look at the big picture, let's reiterate a historical fact: No tyrannical regime has ever been coerced or brought down by any but military means. The Imperial Japanese were subjected by the FDR administration to economic sanctions on their oil imports; the result was Pearl Harbor. The West never bothered to impose economic sanctions on the Soviet Union, although all it took to undermine that rotting imperialist edifice was the simple implement of not economically aiding the Evil Empire and forcing them to compete with us in the dreaded "arms race" on an honest, man-a-mano basis. The economic embargo on Castroite Cuba has never toppled that communist dictatorship (mainly because Moscow, and later Hugo Chavez, and now Barack Obama, propped it up). Saddam Hussein had economic sanctions and "no-fly zones" imposed on him for over a decade and it didn't budge him or slow down his WMD development one jot or tittle. And so it has gone with the mullahs.
The purpose of economic sanctions against Tehran is to create the appearance of Western opposition to the Islamic theocracy and its drive to nuclearize so as to, per its own regular vows over the decades and to this day, "Wipe Israel and America off the map," without ever actually doing anything to prevent that fate or bring about the fall of that regime. The only difference with Barack Obama is that he cares not a whit about that contrived opposition; he's perfectly fine with the mullahs having nukes, even more than the number to which he's reduced us - which, in his mind, is only "fair," since, of course, it's America that is "the source of evil in the modern world," not Islamic jihadism, which is merely a "justifiable reaction" to it. And, of course, he wants that piece of paper to Chamberlainly wave around triumphantly while debarking Air Force One that he thinks will clinch his third term to where he won't even have to decree himself one.
Really, though, the fact that re-ratcheting up economic sanctions on Tehran is bipartisan ought to tell you how strategically worthless doing so would be. Just as the fact that O is reflexively threatening a veto ought to tell you how far up the Supreme Leader's ass he's crawled.
And all of that should tell you in just how much dire peril we all are.
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