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Jewish World Review January 30, 2009 / 5 Shevat 5769 Honest Obama and Iran By Caroline B. Glick
Obama's first phone call to a foreign leader was to PLO chieftain Mahmoud
Abbas last Wednesday morning. And this past Tuesday, Obama gave his first
television interview as president to al-Arabiya pan-Arabic television
network.
In that interview Obama explained the rationale of his approach to the
Muslim world. "We are looking at the region as a whole and communicating a
message to the Arab world and the Muslim world, that we are ready to
initiate a new partnership based on mutual respect and mutual interest," the
new president said.
Obama distanced his administration from its predecessor by asserting that
rather than dictate how Muslims should behave, his administration plans, "to
listen, set aside some of the preconceptions that have existed and have
built up over the last several years. And I think if we do that, then
there's a possibility at least of achieving some breakthroughs."
In short, Obama argues that the root of Islamic world's opposition to the US
is its shattered confidence in America's intentions. By following a policy
of contrition for Bush's "cowboy diplomacy," and acting with deference in
its dealing with the Muslim world, then in his view, a new era of US-Islamic
relations will ensue.
Obama's honesty was a hot subject during the presidential campaign. Many
analysts claimed that he was a closet moderate who only made far leftist
pronouncements about "spreading the wealth around," and meeting with Iran
"without preconditions," to mollify his far left partisan base.
Others argued that Obama was a man of his word. From his voting records in
the Illinois Senate and the US Senate, and in light of his long associations
with domestic and foreign policy radicals, these commentators predicted that
if elected, Obama's policies would be far to the left of center.
Judging by Obama's actions since entering office last week, it appears that
the latter group of analysts was correct. Obama is not a panderer.
Between his economic "stimulus" package, which involves a massive intrusion
by federal government on the free market; his decision to close the US
military prison at Guantanamo Bay; his dispatch of former Senator George
Mitchell to the Middle East to begin pushing for a Palestinian state two
weeks before Israel's general elections; his announcement that he will begin
withdrawing US forces from Iraq; his repeated signaling that the US will no
longer treat the fight against Islamic terrorism as a war; and his attempts
to engineer a diplomatic rapprochement with Iran, Obama has shown that his
policy pronouncements on the campaign trail were serious. The policies he
outlined are the policies with which he intends to govern.
On a strategic level the most significant campaign promise that Obama is
wasting no time in keeping is his attempt to diplomatically engage with the
Islamic Republic of Iran. Iran is the central sponsor of the global jihad.
Hizbullah, Hamas, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad are all Iranian proxies.
And, as is becoming increasingly undeniable, al Qaida too enjoys a close
relationship with the mullahs.
The 9/11 Commission's final report noted that several of the September 11
hijackers transited Iran en route to the US. And in recent weeks we learned
that after spending the past six years in Iran where he played a major role
in directing the insurgency in Iraq, Osama bin Laden's eldest son Sa'ad has
moved to Pakistan.
Beyond its sponsorship of terrorism, due to its nuclear weapons program Iran
is the largest emerging threat to global security. Together with its
genocidal rhetoric against Israel, its calls for the destruction of the US,
and its incitement for the overthrow of the governments of Egypt and Jordan,
among others, Iran is the single largest source of instability in the
region. Moreover, as US Defense Secretary Robert Gates made clear in
testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday, Iran is
working actively in South and Central America to destabilize the Western
Hemisphere.
Obama caused an uproar when during a Democratic primary debate last spring
he said that he would meet with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
without preconditions. In subsequent months, he sought to soften his
declaration. It is now apparent that his statement was not a slip of the
tongue. It was a pledge.
The Iranians for their part have reacted to the new president with a mixture
of relief and contempt. On November 6, two days after the US election,
Ahmadinejad sent a congratulatory letter to Obama. Ahmadinejad's letter was
considered a triumph for Obama's conciliatory posture by the American and
European media. But actually, it was no such thing. Ahmadinejad's letter was
nothing more than a set of demands much like those he had set out in a
letter to then-president George W. Bush in 2006.
In his missive to Obama, Ahmadinejad laid out Iranian preconditions for a
diplomatic engagement with America. Among other things, Ahmadinejad demanded
that the US send all its military forces back to America. As he put it, the
US should, "keep its interventions within its own country's borders."
Ahmadinejad further hinted that the US should end its support for Israel and
withdraw its forces from Iraq and Afghanistan. In his words, "In the
sensitive Middle East region... the expectation is that the unjust [US]
actions of the past 60 years [since Israel was established] will give way to
a policy encouraging the full rights of all nations, especially the
oppressed nations of Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan."
The Western media made much of the fact that some conservative press organs
in Iran condemned Ahmadinejad for sending the letter. They claimed that this
meant that Ahmadinejad himself was tempering his animosity towards the US in
the wake of Obama's election. But in fact, most of the conservative media in
Iran viewed the letter as an attack against Obama who they attacked with
racial slurs.
Sobh-e Sadegh, published by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and
controlled by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei wrote in an editorial on
November 10 that negotiations with Obama would only be worthwhile if,
"coexistence
with a nuclear Iran and acceptance of its regional role are part of the US
negotiating position."
On November 11, Borna News Agency, which is aligned with Ahmadinejad called
Obama "a house slave."
In general, Iran's government controlled media outlets reported that
Ahmadinejad's letter was an ultimatum and that if Obama did not submit to
his demands, the US would be destroyed.
This week Ahmadinejad made Iran's preconditions for negotiations even more
explicit. In statements at a political rally on Tuesday, and in a television
interview given by his advisor on Wednesday, Ahmadinejad said that Iran has
two conditions for engaging Washington. First, the US must abandon its
alliance with Israel. In his words, to have relations with Iran, the US must
first "stop supporting the Zionists, outlaws and criminals."
The second condition was communicated Wednesday by Ahmadinejad's advisor
Aliakbar Javanfekr. Echoing Sobh-e Sadegh's editorial, Javanfekr said Iran
refuses to stop its nuclear activities.
Notably, also on Wednesday, the US-based International Institute for
Strategic Studies released a report concluding that Iran will have a
sufficient quantity of highly enriched uranium to make an atomic bomb in a
matter of months.
To summarize, Iran's conditions for meeting with the Obama administration
are that the US abandon Israel, (which as Ahmadinejad reiterated at his
annual Holocaust denial conference on Tuesday must be annihilated), and that
Obama take no action whatsoever against Iran's nuclear program.
For its part, the Obama administration is signaling that Iran's conditions
haven't swayed it from its path towards a diplomatic engagement of the
mullahs. In her first statement as US Ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice said
Tuesday, "We look forward to engaging in vigorous diplomacy that includes
direct diplomacy with Iran."
And in his al Arabiya interview, Obama implied that the US may be willing to
overlook Iran's support for terrorism when he referred to Iran's "past"
support for terrorist organizations. Obama placed a past tense modifier on
Iranian sponsorship of terrorism even through just last week a US naval ship
intercepted an Iranian vessel smuggling arms to Hamas in Gaza on the Red
Sea. Due to an absence of political authorization to seize the Iranian ship,
the US Navy was compelled to permit it to sail on to Syria.
The most sympathetic interpretation of Obama's desire to move ahead with
diplomatic engagement of Iran in spite of the mullocracy's preconditions is
that he has simply failed to countenance the significance of Iran's demands.
If this is the case, then it is apparent that Obama remains convinced that
the US is indeed to blame for the supposed crisis of confidence that the
Islamic world suffers from in its dealings with America. By this reasoning,
it is for the US, not for Teheran to show its own sincerity, because the US,
rather than Teheran is to blame for the dismal state of relations prevailing
between the two countries.
If in fact Obama truly intends to move ahead with his plan to engage the
mullahs, then he will effectively legitimize — if not adopt — Teheran's
preconditions that the US end its alliance with Israel which Iran seeks to
destroy, and accept a nuclear-armed Iran. And under these circumstances,
Israel's next government — which all opinion polls conclude will be led by
Likud leader Binyamin Netanyahu — will have to adopt certain policies.
First, in keeping with his campaign rhetoric, Netanyahu will have to make
preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons his most urgent priority upon
entering office.
And second, to withstand US pressure to allow the Obama administration time
to develop its ties with Teheran, (time which Iran will use to build its
first nuclear bomb), Netanyahu will need to form as large and wide a
governing coalition as possible. All issues that divide the Israeli
electorate between Right and Left must be temporarily set aside.
In the age of Honest Obama, Israel is alone in recognizing the necessity of
preventing Iran from acquiring the means to destroy the Jewish state.
Consequently, Netanyahu's government will need to proceed with all
deliberate speed to take whatever actions are necessary to prevent Israel's
destruction.
JWR contributor Caroline B. Glick is the senior Middle East Fellow at the Center for Security Policy in Washington, DC and the deputy managing editor of The Jerusalem Post. Comment by clicking here.
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