THE CORBYNIZATION OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY CONTINUES APACE: The Democrats’ Anti-Israel Future. It all changed with Barack Obama.

More alarming for Israel was the change Obama made in American policy toward Iran. The Iranian regime has sworn to wipe “the Zionist entity” off the map. And it was with this regime that Obama sought closer relations as he pulled the U.S. away from Israel.

Some background. In 2002, an exiled opposition group revealed the existence of two nuclear facilities that Iran had kept secret, despite Tehran’s obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Although Tehran insisted that these were intended only to generate electricity, neither clandestine site was connected to the electric grid.

The embarrassment of exposure, and the intimidating implications of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, prompted Iran to suspend much of its nuclear program; subsequently, a leaked U.S. intelligence report implied that Iran had abandoned it entirely. This was false, but it made President Bush feel he could not resort to military action, which may have been the ulterior motive of those who wrote it and leaked it. Although Washington and our European allies agreed on various sanctions and inducements, the problem remained unresolved when Obama took office.

Within a month of his inauguration, Obama sent a secret letter to Iran’s ruler, Ali Khamenei, seeking “cooperation in regional and bilateral relations.” In his memoirs, Obama reports that “Khamenei’s answer was blunt: Iran had no interest in direct talks.” Obama claims that this is what he expected. But he writes, “I’d sent the letter anyway because I wanted to establish that the impediment to negotiations was not America’s intransigence—it was Iran’s.”

Hey remember when the New York Times claimed during the 2008 campaign that:

Senator Obama has said he would do anything in his power to keep Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon, and has spent much of the campaign defending his willingness to negotiate with Iran. He argues that a big mistake the Bush administration made was being unwilling to talk to enemies. When Mr. Bush finally relented in the case of North Korea, he has said, the United States began to make some small progress.

But Mr. Obama has also said he would keep “all options on the table,” the code words for possible military strikes, and he has said that at the end of a negotiation, Iran should not be producing any nuclear fuel on its own territory. His aides stress the need to make clear to Iran how it might benefit by abandoning its nuclear ambitions and ending its support for terrorism.

Good times, good times.