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Home » Obama campaigned on being kinder and gentler to Iran

Obama campaigned on being kinder and gentler to Iran

The New Neo Posted on by

In a recent thread, a discussion of Obama’s Iran policy came up. Here’s one remark:

Obama’s brave new idea amounted to surrendering to an enemy. His method was to re-brand them as a non-enemy, without any clear reasoning as far as I could tell. I could not believe it and still don’t understand it. He reached out secretly to this enemy, we now know, and then he engineered a “deal” that gave them the terms they asked for, with nothing in return; and not only did he not pursue this as a normal treaty, which would have required Congressional approval, he closed the “deal” without even putting anything in writing.

Although the extremity and audacity of the Iran deal was extraordinary, it’s not as though Obama didn’t hint right from the start of his term, and even while campaigning, that he was going to make nice to the mullahs. He was short on detail and long on vagueness. But still, it was alarming.

For example, see this from May of 2008:

Sen. Barack Obama on Sunday accused Sen. Hillary Clinton of echoing the “bluster” of President Bush when she said the U.S. would be able to “obliterate” Iran if it used nuclear weapons against Israel.

“It’s not the language we need right now, and I think it’s language reflective of George Bush,” Obama told NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

Clinton made the statement about Iran on ABC’s “Good Morning America” on Tuesday.

“I want the Iranians to know that if I’m the president, we will attack Iran [if it attacked Israel],” Clinton said. “In the next 10 years, during which they might foolishly consider launching an attack on Israel, we would be able to totally obliterate them.”…

…”[I]t is important that we use language that sends a signal to the world community that we’re shifting from the sort of cowboy diplomacy, or lack of diplomacy, that we’ve seen out of George Bush,” [Obama] said. “And this kind of language is not helpful.”

Among other things, it’s an interesting (and I believe significant) example of Obama’s emphasis on the power of language. I believe the mullahs already understood that if Obama became president it wasn’t just language that was going to change, it was the depth of the US’s commitment to defending Israel, and their need to fear the US in general.

Then in March of 2009, Obama sent a message to Iran:

The message for Iran’s leaders at this “season of new beginnings” was a reprise of the approach he signalled in his inaugural address: commitment to engagement – and in an emollient tone that again contrasted sharply with that of George Bush, who included the Islamic Republic in his “axis of evil”.

“This process will not be advanced by threats,” the president said, hinting perhaps that Americans as well as Iranians needed to take that lesson on board. “We seek instead engagement that is honest and grounded in mutual respect.”

Despite avoiding the tangled nuclear dossier – specifically Iran’s refusal to halt uranium enrichment – Obama did warn that “terror and arms” did not sit well with the “real responsibilities” that went with Iran’s “rightful place in the community of nations”.

The White House and state ­department are looking at a range of other ways to reach out to Tehran. It has been invited to an international conference on Afghanistan later this month and the US wants to see it co-operate as US forces prepare to leave Iraq.

Note that last bit, which offers a big clue as to one reason Obama was so eager to be friends with Iran: he had promised to leave Iraq, and he was going to give the Iranians carte blanche to become the policemen there in the wake of our withdrawal.

It also signals once again his reliance on words to create a new reality. “Mutual respect”? Dream on.

But there were deeper reasons for Obama’s softening on Iran. Was it the influence of Valerie Jarrett, as so many people have said? I don’t think so. I think they were on the same page about Iran, but arrived at their views independently. The left has been sympathetic to Iran and the mullahs right from the start, and even helped them achieve power (although the left believed that the left would ultimately be the beneficiaries, and would be the ones in power there after the shah left). For Obama, a man of the left, there was nothing particularly “evil” about Iran, and allying more with it was a natural thing to want to do.

Not only would Iran help him withdraw from Iraq, but ultimately negotiating some sort of peace deal with Iran would be a feather in his cap, a great personal accomplishment that would go down in history books. It would vindicate his view of foreign policy and the enormous value of diplomacy, even with a state such as Iran. It would also establish him definitively as the un-Bush, the guy who defeated the entire idea of “cowboy diplomacy.” And it would further ingratiate him with Western Europe.

There really was no downside, as far as Obama could see.

Comments

Obama campaigned on being kinder and gentler to Iran — 16 Comments

  1. There really was no downside, as far as Obama could see.

    So much this.

    Half a million dead Syrians? Not an obstacle, for Obama is wise.

    Iranians protesting to be free, yet to remain enslaved? They don’t know what is good for them, but Obama does, for Obama is wise.

  2. Neo: Was it the influence of Valerie Jarrett, as so many people have said? I don’t think so.

    She was born in Iran and I have always wondered the extent to which that influenced her decision making.

  4. There have been speculations, Obama in a corset, worse than Michelle in a gunny sack. Where is the meme generator?

  5. The fact that they were an enemy made them appealing to BO. See his deal with Cuba. Now read back issues of The Nation from 1981. Now recall that he counted Bernadine Dohrn and Wm. Ayers of his circle of friends. Read back issues of NACLA Report on the Americas. For a cagier development of such themes, read back issues of The New York Review of Books or Harper’s under Lewis Lapham (especially articles by Walter Karp and Lapham himself). A fat chunk of our intelligentsia favored the other side during the Cold War.

  6. Art Deco
    Read back issues of NACLA Report on the Americas.
    Occasionally, NACLA told the truth. When I was working on a rig in the Guatemalan jungle, locals told me that the generals had appropriated for themselves a bunch of land in the area. (Alta Verapaz- Peten area). Several years later, I read about that land grab in a NACLA article.

    I was working in a war zone. Locals told me they just wanted to be left alone. Neither generals not guerrillas.

    But yes, NACLA was far lefty. I haven’t read it in years. Is it still around?

  7. Obama never saw Iran gaining nuclear weapons capability as a threat, he saw it as another tool with which to rein in American aggressiveness.

    Since Obama was certain that the next President would also be a democrat… no possibility of a downside existed.

    What’s really scary is that had Hillary won, Obama’s appeasement policy would still be in effect and Iran would by now be very close to nuclear ICBM weapons capability.

  9. Geoffrey Britain on January 24, 2020 at 4:42 pm said:
    Obama never saw Iran gaining nuclear weapons capability as a threat, … no possibility of a downside FOR HIM existed.

    * * *
    Fixed it for ya’.
    Plenty of downsides for everyone else.

  10. In foreign affairs, Obama had a knack for doing the opposite of what he should have done.

    The US government’s first priority and that of its chief executive is national defense. Obama’s priority seemed to be to defend the rest of the world (which includes Iran) from the US.

    We (the US) also had an opportunity (one squandered by both Presidents Bush and Obama) to create allies on either side of Iran (Afghanistan and Iraq) much like the Marshall Plan did with former enemy states Germany and Japan.

  11. Dr. Thomas Sowell has said that his biggest fear was Iran exploding a nuke somewhere in the US and Obama surrendering to Iran. Perhaps hyperbole, but Dr. Sowell is not a foolish man.

  12. Oh, c’mon, follow the money! Barack and Michelle craved money. What better way than to do a deal with Iran that yielded Iran $150 BILLION? Would an under-table “commission” of 1 or 2% to Barack Hussein the deal-maker be a deal- breaker? No way. And in the rarefied atmosphere of the global super-elites, this money is hidden.
    The Obamas are billionaires, baby.

  13. Tony Badran, FDD: Revisionist history on the Iran deal

    President Trump’s decision to eliminate Iranian terror master Qassem Soleimani followed Tehran’s repeated violent escalations aimed at the United States and the region. But to hear former Obama administration officials tell it, Iran’s continued violence is America’s fault. For Team Obama, the cause of Iran’s region-wide belligerence and attacks on U.S. targets is simple: Trump renounced the Iran nuclear deal.

    Today’s crisis, wrote President Barack Obama’s top Middle East deputy Robert Malley, is “rooted in President Trump’s ill-advised and reckless decision to exit the nuclear deal and embark on a policy of ‘maximum pressure.’” And it was all predictable, too. “This moment was nothing if not foreseeable the moment Mr. Trump abandoned the 2015 agreement, which was working,” added former Secretary of State John Kerry.

    But what does Obama’s nuclear agreement have to do with stopping Iran’s destabilizing actions across the region? After all, the former president and his aides always insisted, when making their sales pitch for the deal back in 2015, there was no connection. The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, they said, was simply about reining in Iran’s nuclear ambitions. It was a narrow arms control agreement that had nothing to do with Iran’s terrorism and adventurism around the Middle East and beyond. When critics pointed to Iran’s expansionist and destabilizing campaigns in the region, its ballistic missile program, and its sponsorship of terrorism, Obama officials waved them off dismissively: We have no illusions about Iran, but that’s not part of this.

    So, why is Team Obama livid about Trump pushing back against Iranian attacks? It’s because the nuclear-deal sales pitch was insincere, cover for a strategic vision that it knew was politically indefensible. The accord was never just an arms control agreement. It was an instrument for geopolitical realignment designed to elevate Iran.

  14. Badran, cont’d:

    Tethering the nuclear deal to the U.S. counterterrorism campaign against the Islamic State would serve to reinforce the realignment and the larger, geopolitical scope of the deal. The primary theater for this partnership was Iraq, where Soleimani’s Shiite militias ran the show. For all the lip service the Obama administration paid to “empowering the moderates” in Iran, its real partnership was with Khamenei and his right-hand man, Soleimani. This is likely why, as former Bush administration senior director for the Middle East Michael Doran recently revealed, and as a Trump administration senior official confirmed, the Obama administration also sent letters to Soleimani, presumably to explore the possibility of jointly combating ISIS.

    What that meant in practice was that the U.S. would help prop up Iranian political orders in Iraq and Lebanon and help to put down any Sunni insurgencies against those orders. As an Obama official put it in 2015, “Because we have a common enemy, a common goal, everybody is moving in the same direction.” The trick was for the U.S. to avoid crossing Iran’s “red lines,” or else jeopardize the partnership. As the official cautioned, “You cross a red line in Syria, you start to infringe on what Iran sees as its long-term interest, and those Shia militias could turn in the other direction.” In other words, crossing Iran would lose the U.S. permission from Tehran to kill Sunni insurgents and put the lives of American soldiers in Iraq at risk. Obama committed to that arrangement in writing, reassuring Khamenei in his letters that Bashar Assad’s regime in Syria would not be touched, only ISIS.

    The pretext of the nuclear deal also served to boost the other side of the equation, distancing the U.S. from its traditional allies, especially Israel. Like clockwork, whenever the Israelis would take action about the growing Iranian threat, an anonymous Obama official could be trusted to leak that the Israelis were recklessly endangering our counterterrorism partnership and risking the lives of American men and women in Iraq and elsewhere.

  16. FB – thanks for the link. Great speech.
    Lots of applause lines, but one misfire that amused me — he said, about people around the world, “they love capitalism, not that S-word” and no one laughed; did the audience not recognize that S stands for Socialism?
    Judging from the applause at other standard conservative lines, it couldn’t be because they approved of it over capitalism!

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