Obama’s folly in Iran needs a page from Reagan’s playbook

President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry are negotiating an agreement with Iran that will accelerate a nuclear arms race in a part of the world that has begun a 30-year, fight to the finish, religious war. It is a prescription for disaster.

The administration won’t portray it that way, of course. They will say they have succeeded in slowing down Iran’s program. They will offer the usual Obama straw man argument -- it’s a choice between this deal and war with Iran. And nobody wants another war in the Middle East.

Yet some neo-Conservatives have called for just that: they say the only way to stop Iran’s bomb is to bomb Iran. But these are the same folks who said the Iraq war would be short, sweet and cheap.

They’re both wrong. The choice is not between capitulation and war. Foreign policy is what’s conducted between these two extremes. Our policy shouldn’t be either let Iran get the bomb or bomb Iran. We should do something different, in the middle. We should do what Ronald Reagan did with the Soviet Union. He didn’t accept Soviet aggression, but he didn’t want to go to war with them either. Reagan maneuvered events so the people of the Soviet Union demanded regime change.

Our policy toward Iran should not be Obama-style capitulation, or Bush-style war, but Reagan-style regime change, where we push their economy to the brink and Iranian people rise up and demand change.

We have enormous leverage to bring against Iran, if we chose to. We could push for a better deal by imposing punitive sanctions. We could freeze them out of the world banking system. We could tighten the economic noose around Iran’s neck. We could encourage the pro-American, pro-democracy movement in Iran to challenge the mullahs. We could tear down Iran’s cyberwall, so their young and literate population can see what the rest of the world is like and launch a social media driven revolution of their own. More than 70 percent of Iranians are under the age of 30. How long will they tolerate being ruled by a handful of 80-year-old mullahs who have pushed their economy into freefall? The Iranian people took to the streets in 2009 to demand government change, but President Obama turned his back on them. Could we encourage them this time?

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2015/04/01/obamas-folly-in-iran-needs-page-from-reagans-playbook/