What Obama Pursuing in Iran & Cuba Isn't Peace

The list of countries designated by the United States as state sponsors of terrorism is a pretty exclusive club, a veritable Legion of Doom populated by the likes of North Korea and Syria. The Obama administration has, for reasons that seem to be mainly political, shown extraordinary solicitude toward two countries that were on the State Department’s list when he became president: Cuba and Iran. Cuba has been removed from the list — “Cuba meets the statutory criteria for rescission” was the State Department’s bloodless explanation — and John Kerry has been dispatched to Havana to raise the flag over a reopened U.S. embassy there. Cuba hasn’t lost its taste for terrorism — the Castro regime maintains ties with FARC terrorists in Colombia and ETA terrorists in Spain, among others — but its enthusiasm for such patronage has outlived most of its clients.