Gerald Seib, writing in The Wall Street Journal earlier in the week, had some thoughts about President Barack Obama and the Cooperation Council for the Arab States of the Gulf, an association of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates who are just across the Arabian Gulf from Iran. Seib anticipates that Obama will invite the six to Camp David to discuss Obama’s Iranian nuclear weapons deal.

Senior American officials have made clear that this is a conversation they now want to have to reassure the Gulf states, particularly the giant among them, Saudi Arabia.

No. This is a conversation Obama and his should have wanted to have—should have had—before beginning their foolishness with Iran and that they should have been having throughout those…negotiations.

Seib recognized the problem, if not the timing of its response.

The underlying question, of course, is whether the Gulf states now trust the US enough to embrace security guarantees or pledges of new defense cooperation. The answer is crucially important if the US is to convince the Gulf’s Sunni leaders that it isn’t tilting toward Shiite Iran. It’s also important to prevent a different and more ominous kind of reaction: a move by the Saudis to instead acquire their own nuclear weapon, by dialing up their friends in Pakistan to place an order, because they aren’t convinced Iran’s nuclear program will be stopped.

It’s too late, now. The damage is done, and we’ll be years repairing it. Hopefully Israel will still be alive.

Hopefully, the Gulf Cooperation Council will still be interested in our input for dealing with a nuclear armed Iran.

In the face of Congressional objections to the nuclear arms deal “negotiated” with Iran, President Barack Obama had this to say:

If Congress kills this deal—not based on expert analysis, and without offering any reasonable alternative—then it’s the United States that will be blamed for the failure of diplomacy. International unity will collapse, and the path to conflict will widen.

Of course, it couldn’t possibly because this deal needs to be killed. It couldn’t possibly be that Obama and his Secretary of State are such incompetent negotiators that this deal is itself not a reasonable alternative. It couldn’t possibly be that Obama and Kerry are so oblivious that they think a deal that allows Iran to continue to enrich uranium; that allows Iran to continue to use Fordo (itself a nuclear facility built and operated in secret, in violation of prior Iranian agreements, and that inspection régimes were terribly slow to detect); a deal that has no meaningful inspection process, only prior notice walkthroughs that are carefully choreographed by the inspectee is somehow a good deal.

Never mind that the US is going to be blamed for something in this no matter what we do, or that we should not be developing our foreign policy based on what others think of us. Never mind that with an active Iranian nuclear weapons program intact, the “path to conflict” and the destruction of Israel already is wide open.

Nope. Couldn’t be any of that.

Russia wants a cease fire in Yemen; it wants the Saudis, et al., to stop their bombing campaign against the Houthi rebels there. Saudi Arabia isn’t to secure its southern border.

Russia has presented a draft resolution calling for a humanitarian cease-fire in Yemen at an emergency meeting of the United Nations Security Council that Moscow called on Saturday, [Vladimir Safronkov, Russian Deputy UN Ambassador] said.

If the Russians want this cease fire, it can only be because their clients are in trouble. The only “humanitarian” concern Russia has is the welfare of the Houthis. The need, then, is not for a cease fire but for the Saudi-led air coalition to step up the pressure, increase their sortie rate, pile on.