If this is true (and though DebkaFile is not always entirely reliable, it is very unlikely to be entirely wrong), it is the worst development yet to come out of the Syria brouhaha.

The new Iranian president Hassan Rouhani announced Tuesday that the coming meeting of the General Assembly opening in New York later this month “may prove the perfect setting to reignite talks about the nation’s nuclear program.“

The US Treasury Department accordingly lifted a string of sanctions [against Iran] restricting humanitarian and athletic exchanges between US and Iranian NGOs and environmental projects, as a counter-gesture of good will. …

That same day, the Iranian president declared his country would not give up “one iota of its nuclear capabilities.” …

The secret exchange of messages between Washington, Tehran, Moscow and Damascus focused first on a Russian pledge to bring Assad’s chemical arsenal under international control … This was followed by Tehran consenting to engage in direct dialogue with Washington when the next UN General Assembly session opens in New York on September 23. …

Our Iranian sources report that Tehran was in on all stages of the discreet Obama-Putin discussions on Syria: High-ranking Iranian officials were present in Damascus and Moscow throughout, and points of agreement were brought to Tehran for approval.

“Points of agreement were brought to Tehran for approval”. Ponder that.

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On the same topic of Obama’s cluelessness, fumbling and failure over Syria and the Middle East generally, we reproduce here our Facebook summary of an IBD editorial:

Russia is filling the U.S. power vacuum on its way back to superpower status. Rather than impale his enemies on stakes like his gruesome medieval namesake, Vlad Putin prefers ordering radioactive isotopes to be dropped in their tea, which is how exiled Russian journalist/activist Alexander Litvinenko was murdered in 2006. It should be no surprise that such a man, while touting his new breakthrough for Mideast peace, is already sending new conventional weapons to Syria. Israel’s Channel 2 reports that parts for tanks are already on their way from Russia for Assad’s forces as they fight the nation’s rebels, and that Syria’s order of 24 MiG-29 fighter jets, postponed by Moscow, may be back in the offing. President Assad without chemical weapons might just end up more powerful than he was with them. As Charles Krauthammer points out, the upshot is “the retaining in power of Assad, and of the Iran/Hezbollah/Assad/Russian axis dominating the region.” But the more distressing aspect to what becomes a sorrier episode with each passing day is the inexcusable transfer of geopolitical prestige from America to Putin’s Russia. Obama thinks his sometime pal Vladimir has just saved him from becoming a lame duck president for three years. But in fact Obama has, thanks to Putin, just ruined the American position in the Middle East, our patrimony of the last seven decades.