The combination of the State Department’s announcement that the United States will accept Iran’s “terms” for talks and the Ayatollah Khamenei’s hard line speech at Friday prayers in Tehran spells appeasement.

From the Times’ story on the coming “talks”:

The Obama administration said Friday that the United States would accept Iran’s offer to meet, fulfilling President Obama’s pledge to hold unconditional talks despite the Iranian government’s insistence that it would not negotiate over the future of its nuclear program….

In advance of Friday’s announcement, senior administration officials said that their offer to negotiate directly with the Iranians, for what could turn into the first substantive talks since the Iranian Revolution in 1979, was, as a senior official had earlier put it, a “bona fide offer.”

But at the same time, officials said their expectations were extremely low. They also said their willingness to proceed was based in part on a recognition that some form of talks had to take place before the United States could make a case for imposing far stronger sanctions on Iran.

“We’ll be looking to see if they are willing to engage seriously on these issues,” said a State Department spokesman, Philip J. Crowley. “If we have talks, we will plan to bring up the nuclear issue.”

From the Wall Street Journal’s assessment of Khamenei’s speech:

Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in his second address to the nation since the turmoil over the June presidential election, set a tough tone for where the country is heading: No compromises with opponents outside or inside Iran.

Mr. Khamenei, delivering a sermon at Tehran’s Friday prayers, said that if opposition leaders continue to question the legitimacy of the political system and create divisions among the public, he would have no choice but to “take out the eye of the storm.” The comments set the stage for the possible arrest of opposition leaders Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi.

Mr. Khamenei reiterated that Iran wouldn’t bend to Western powers when it comes to its nuclear program. To give up rights, “whether nuclear right or otherwise, would result in a nation’s demise,” he said.

It is apparent that the Obama Administration will not act to stop Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons. Now the only question is whether America will interfere with Israel’s efforts to stop the world’s most fanatical regime from gaining WMD.

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