Can you believe that nineteen months have passed since Barack Obama became President?  A lot has happened in those nineteen months, but in some ways, much hasn’t — including Iran’s push for a nuclear weapon.  Three years after the US intel community inexplicably decided that Tehran wasn’t trying to build a nuke and almost two years after Obama’s “smart power” and “outstretched hand” guided foreign policy, the mullahcracy hasn’t deflected an inch from its trajectory towards being a nuclear-armed nation.

But don’t worry, the Obama administration told Israel last week, because they won’t get one for another year — we think:

The Obama administration, citing evidence of continued troubles inside Iran’s nuclear program, has persuadedIsrael that it would take roughly a year — and perhaps longer — for Iran to complete what one senior official called a “dash” for a nuclear weapon, according to American officials. …

Israeli intelligence officials had argued that Iran could complete such a race for the bomb in months, while American intelligence agencies have come to believe in the past year that the timeline is longer.

“We think that they have roughly a year dash time,” said Gary Samore, President Obama’s top adviser on nuclear issues, referring to how long it would take the Iranians to convert nuclear material into a working weapon. “A year is a very long period of time.”

Yeah, it seems longer all the time, too.

Let’s not forget that it’s been more than a year since Obama and his administration essentially voted “present” on the uprising in Tehran after the mullahs botched a rigged election so badly that everyone noticed it, and almost as long since Obama asserted that he was losing patience with Iran’s rejection of his outstretched hand.  In fact, it’s been more than a year since Obama asked Israel to give him six months to resolve the Iranian nuclear-weapons crisis.

And a year is a very long time, indeed, when one is waiting for an ally to act as though they’re concerned about an existential threat to their people.

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