It’s almost over. It really doesn’t much matter if a triumphant US Secretary of State John Kerry announces in the next few hours or days that a dramatic accord has been reached with Iran to regulate its nuclear program, or if it is decided to extend the negotiations beyond the November 24 deadline to finalize that deal. We know where the negotiations are heading. We know that the conclusion is dire.

The P5+1 countries, their approach to talks with the ayatollahs determined by the Obama administration, have insistently behaved like the Three Wise Monkeys. Iran pours its energies into mastering the technology for nuclear weapons. From its “supreme leader” on down it makes crystal clear its hegemonic regional ambitions, its contempt for the West, and its aim to bring about the demise of Israel. And the US-led international community willfully closes its eyes and ears to the dangers, wishing them away.

Ultimately, the failure is rooted in President Barack Obama’s desire to heal relations with America’s enemies in this part of the world. But what the administration would like to have perceived as a new generosity of spirit emanating from Washington, a desire to conquer past animosities, to build new bridges, to play fair, is regarded in this brutal region, by the purveyors of that brutality, as weakness.

The P5+1 negotiators aim to avoid humiliating Iran, so they choose not to insist on IAEA inspectors gaining access to the Parchin facility where they would find evidence of Iran’s years of efforts at nuclear weaponization. And thus Iran can publicly maintain the fiction that it does not seek, and has not been seeking, the bomb.

The P5+1 negotiators back away from the earlier goal of using the economic pressure of sanctions in order to force Iran into a strategic U-turn — to dismantle the facilities and equipment that have brought it so far along the road to nuclear weapons — and instead now work for an accord that would, in theory, keep Iran some 6 to 18 months from the ability to produce the fissile material for a bomb. This very framework is a tacit admission that Iran, if left unchecked, would push full speed ahead to the nuclear weapons it risibly claims not to seek. But the negotiators prefer not to acknowledge this logistical flaw at the heart of their approach.

Read the article in full at the Times of Israel.