President Obama’s CIA chief said Tuesday night that Iran was on its knees before Obama lifted them up and gave them billions and a path to nuclear weapons.

Nowhere have Barack Obama’s many failures been as clear and dangerous as they have been in the foreign policy and national security areas.  There has been a lot of news about his surrender to the mad mullahs of Iran.  The magnitude of the surrender was made even clearer in a speech given by Obama’s own CIA director, John Brennan:

The director of the Central Intelligence Agency has provided the first public glimpse of American intelligence assessments about why Iran’s leadership agreed to the tentative nuclear accord last week, saying that Iran’s president persuaded its supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, that their country’s economy was “destined to go down” unless he reached an understanding with the West.

The C.I.A. director, John O. Brennan, speaking Tuesday night at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, suggested that a key to the deal was the election of President Hassan Rouhani, who had hardly been the supreme leader’s first choice.

It took more than two years, he suggested, for the new president, a former nuclear negotiator himself, to persuade the far more isolated Ayatollah Khamenei that “six years of sanctions had really hit,” and that the economic future imperiled the country’s leadership.

Ronald Reagan brought down the Soviet Union and freed hundreds of millions of people in Eastern Europe.  He waged economic warfare against the Soviet Union (as well as battling them through proxies in Afghanistan, which tragically helped give rise to al-Qaeda – that has to be admitted).  Economic warfare, in conjunction with the Sunni oil producers flooding the world with cheap oil, could have led to regime change.  Obama stood aside when the Green Revolution struck Iran in 2009, leading protesters – many of whom were later tortured and killed – to chant “Obama, are you with us or the mullahs?”  I am sure they did not mean that rhetorically, but might as well have, since the answer was clear.

Iran’s economy is overwhelmingly dependent on high prices of oil and gas; unlike its Sunni rivals, it has very small reserves of cash to tide it over in times of economic stress.  The Sunnis fear an ascendant Shiite empire under control of the mullahs.  They would have willingly cooperated in bringing down the Iranian regime.  The Saudis served in that role when they helped to bring about the downfall of the Soviet Union (they viewed them as godless, with predatory designs on the Middle East).

America under George W. Bush led the world in ensuring that Libya give up its nuclear weapons program (this triumph led to the unraveling of the network of nuclear proliferators that allowed Pakistan to build a nuclear arsenal).  Years before, Argentina, South Africa, and Brazil had also been compelled to stop their nuclear programs.  Those actions occurred under different presidents – who were leaders.

Instead, we have the worst commander-in-chief in American history, who snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.

We, again, have to wonder: whose side is out president on?

And John Brennan has the gall to insult critics of the deal that will lead to a Shiite bomb.