What are the chances that the Obama administrations strikes a deal with Iran before the deadline later this month?

This is an administration in free fall and, as creative writer and national security council staffer Ben Rhodes told some liberal activists last January,

“Bottom line is, this is the best opportunity we’ve had to resolve the Iranian issue diplomatically, certainly since President Obama came to office, and probably since the beginning of the Iraq war,” Rhodes said. “So no small opportunity, it’s a big deal. This is probably the biggest thing President Obama will do in his second term on foreign policy. This is healthcare for us, just to put it in context.”

Nobody in America is clamoring for an Iran nuke deal. But it's significant that the administration views an agreement with Iran in such a world-historical context.It means they will probably give away the store and guarantee an Iranian bomb before long in order to strike a deal.

Matthew Continetti:

The interim deal with Iran struck in November 2013, in which the administration traded sanctions relief worth billions of dollars for promises to limit nuclear fuel production, was extended in July and is now scheduled to lapse on November 24.

“I’m not going to give it odds,” Secretary of State John Kerry said Thursday of the chances of a final deal. “As I said to the president, I’m not going to express optimism, I’m going to express hope.”

And I am going to express fear. Fear that the chances of some sort of dangerous and misguided détente with Iran are high, and that they increase if Republicans capture the Senate and improve their majority in the House. Fear that the worse things get for Obama at home, the better the odds that he will hand the keys of the Middle East to Ayatollah Khamenei.

Fear that Obama sees an Iran deal not just as health care reform for the second term, but as his version of George W. Bush’s surge: a Hail Mary pass thrown in the fourth quarter in a long-shot attempt to salvage a legacy.

Bush ordered the surge despite having just lost an election. Obama is on the verge of losing another. And Obama will be no different from Bush in the pursuit of his desired ends.

Iran is Obama’s Iraq. It occupies the same place in the thinking of his administration that Iraq held in his predecessor’s. The desire for détente with Iran, for comity and diplomatic accord between longtime enemies, for a new Middle East in which security is left to regional stakeholders, and Shiite and Sunni alike see the United States as “evenhanded” in its treatment of Israelis and Palestinians, holds immense sway over the alliance of progressives and realists that conduct American foreign policy. It has for a decade.

“The support group should actively engage Iran and Syria in its diplomatic dialogue, without preconditions,” stated the report of the 2006 Iraq Study Group, authored in part by Ben Rhodes.

“To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent,” President Obama said in his first Inaugural Address, “know that you are on the wrong side of history, but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.”

He might as well have said it in Farsi.

A "Hail Mary" pass, indeed. The fact that the administration is deliberately structuring the agreement so they can avoid getting Senate approval tells us how bad this deal is going to be. Obama may even use his executive authority to cancel most of the sanctions on Iran - a move that would elicit bi-partisan outrage.

It is outrageous that the president is willing to roll the dice with our national security so that history will look kindly on him. His "legacy" may end up being a Middle East gripped by a nuclear arms race with Iranian regional hegemony a reality.