LAUGHED AT AGAIN - AT 8:19 A.M. ET:  The extent to which the Obama foreign policy is being laughed at all over the world was brought home to us in Copenhagen, where the attitude toward the president of the United States was, "Write a big check or go away."  Anyone surprised?

Now the president of Iran, facing a deadline from Obama that is little more than a week away, shows more reverence toward the president who was going to change the world with a sweep of his hand.  From Britain's veddy leftist Guardian:

The Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, today dismissed a year-end deadline set by the US for Iran to accept a UN-brokered deal to swap enriched uranium for nuclear fuel.

As Iran faces a renewed US drive for further sanctions, Ahmadinejad made light of the threat. "If Iran wanted to make a bomb, we would be brave enough to tell you," he told supporters in the southern city of Shiraz. He said the west could give Iran "as many deadlines as they want, we don't care."

In an interview aired on US television yesterday, Ahmadinejad dismissed documents apparently describing Iranian efforts to make a nuclear trigger as "fabricated and distributed by the US."

The president brushed away a report in last week's Times newspaper that cited confidential Iranian technical documents detailing a four-year plan to test a neutron initiator, the part of a nuclear warhead that triggers detonation.

"No, I don't want to see them at all. I don't," he said. "They are all fabricated bunch of papers continuously being forged and disseminated by the American government," Ahmadinejad told ABC News.

David Axelrod, a top White House adviser, said the charge that the US had forged the documents was "nonsense."

COMMENT:  This will be Obama's greatest foreign-policy challenge of 2010, and so far his approach has been just a bit higher than casual.  There does not seem any great likelihood that he will bring China and Russia on board for serious sanctions against Iran, so he'll have to accept lesser, ineffective sanctions, while calling them "unprecedented," this administration's favorite adjective.

And Iran will play the very effective game of nuclear ambiguity - rolling ahead with its nuke program while denying any interest in weapons.  Remember, engineers today don't actually have to test a nuclear bomb to know that it will work.  Modern computer simulation can replace testing, which is probably why we've never seen an Israeli nuclear test.  So the appeasers can always claim that we have no "proof" that Iran has the bomb.

We live in interesting times, as the Chinese say.  And they mean it as a curse.

December 22, 2009