Rhetoric dreams fade fast when confronted with political reality.

Despite President-Elect Obama calling for easy, unconditional talks with just about everybody, and for quickly getting US GIs out of Iraq, reality bites the ass of expectations.
How quickly should troops leave, however, is the main concern, especially with the Pentagon.

Obama’s stance on Iran, however, has a ‘what the shit?’ under-taste, like, this dude should have better sense.
Indications are he’s shifting views from the openness expressed during the CNN/YouTube debate last year to a kind of clinched fist approach voiced in a July speech to a pro-Israel group.
Iran should be way down on the list for really big problems.
Indeed, a better relationship with Iran could help the looming catastrophic disaster that’s Afghanistan.
(Illustration was found here).

Instead, Obama presented a fairly strong voice in his first press conference toward Iran, even downplaying a congratulatory message from its boogie-man president.

• US President-elect Barack Obama said on Friday that Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons was “unacceptable” and he would “respond appropriately” to a congratulatory letter from President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
  …
  “It has only been three days since the election,” he added. “Obviously, how we approach and deal with a country like Iran is not something that we should, you know, simply do in a knee-jerk fashion.
  “I think we’ve got to think it through.”

Think about what?
A piece at investigative post atlargely.com has the narrative line:

• I firmly believe that Obama was the best of two choices and that he’ll make the world safer by being less likely by far to carry through on belligerent rhetoric that ignores the facts as they are known — but let’s not stick our heads in the sand about his oft-repeated words and what they in fact mean.
  He has ignored/denied the IAEA and NIE findings almost as much as Bush or McCain have, doubtless for his own political reasons. (I refuse to believe he’s so dumb as to actually 100% believe his bald claim that Iran is actively seeking nukes in the face of the extant evidence.)

The National Intelligence Estimate last winter on Iran’s nuclear weapons program dropped a anti-Decider George bomb that the Iranians had discontinued atom warfare activities in 2003.
Not to mention Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s fatwa, which forbids the production, stockpiling and use of nuclear weapons and we have a good argument to chill out about the Iranians.

Always-interesting writer (and former Navy guy) Jeff Huber posted some acute observations today on Obama’s mental drift into some other netherworld in foreign policy.

• One has to wonder, then, how much of the neocon line on Iran Barack Obama had swallowed when he said at his first post election press conference that, “Iran’s development of a nuclear weapon I believe is unacceptable. We have to mount an international effort to prevent that from happening.”
  …
  Iran’s conventional forces can’t project power against Israel.
  Its army has never operated more than ten miles from its border, and that was in the only war Iran ever fought, one that Iraq started by invading Iran, by the way. (Iran never invaded anybody, which is a lot more than you can say for, um, Israel-yay.)
  Iran’s antique air force would shoot itself down or run out of gas before it got halfway across the Persian Gulf, and its coast guard of a navy would sink of natural causes before it reached the Red Sea.
  Their navy might be able to close the Strait of Hormuz for a little while, but not to the extent that a barrel of oil would cost the same as a B-2 stealth bomber.
  They might be able to embarrass our Navy, if they get lucky.
  A torpedo up the prop locker of a Nimitz class aircraft carrier might put it out of action for the duration; we might even have to tow one of those behemoths all the way home. It’s pretty near impossible to sink a carrier, though. The Klingons might be able to pull it off, but like Iran’s nuclear weapons program, the Klingons don’t actually exist.
  …
  Less than 10 percent of is Iran is arable.
  The rest is mainly mountain and desert. Iran’s population and infrastructure are gathered in eight major cities. If Iran ever were to acquire a nuclear weapon and put it in a ballistic missile and launch it at someone, the retaliation would effectively end the 6,000-year old Persian civilization in the course of an afternoon.

Read Huber’s post here.

We just hope Obama has enough audacity to stay the right course.