Over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal reported that the exchange of secret letters between President Obama and Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has resumed. The letters are believed to concern Obama’s offer of cooperation with Iran against ISIS terrorists if Tehran will agree to a deal on its nuclear program. These letters have clearly been a crucial element in the six-year administration effort to forge a new détente with the Islamist regime. But they must also be placed in the context of the ongoing dispute between the U.S. and Israel about the nuclear talks. Yesterday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu chided the U.S. for attempting to hide the details about the negotiations from Israel. While the president doesn’t like or trust the prime minister, those concerned about a drift toward accommodation of Iran’s demands are not wrong to note that the secrecy about the negotiations undermines the credibility of the administration’s assurances that it can be trusted not to betray the Israelis or American security interests in a futile pursuit of good relations with Khamenei’s government.
For the past few weeks, concerns about the details of the terms the U.S. is offering to Iran in the nuclear talks have been obscured by the controversy about Netanyahu’s determination to speak to a joint session of Congress next month about Iran. As I’ve pointed out, accepting House Speaker John Boehner’s invitation was a tactical blunder on Netanyahu’s part since it allowed the president and his apologists to divert the discussion about Iran from his indefensible pursuit of an entente with a radical terror-sponsoring tyranny to one about the Israeli’s alleged breach of protocol. This was a no-win confrontation for Israel and its friends that may have made it harder for Congress to pass tougher sanctions on Iran with a veto-proof majority because of defections from Democrats concerned about not taking sides with a foreign leader against the president. But the Journal report reminds us that the stakes here involve a lot more than the personal animus between Obama and Netanyahu.
The decision of the U.S. to keep Israel out of the loop about the details of its talks with Iran makes sense only inside the White House bubble where Netanyahu—the democratically-elected leader of America’s ally—is perceived as an enemy and the theocrat tyrant Khamenei is viewed as the head of a nation that must be wooed and won over in an effort to forge an entente with Tehran. Diplomacy is always best practiced outside of public view, but the problem with the discussion about Iran is that the administration’s public stand about its desire to prevent the regime from getting a nuclear weapon is at odds with everything we know about the negotiations.
As the Washington Post’s David Ignatius pointed out yesterday, the White House continues to claim that its offers to let Iran keep much of its nuclear infrastructure are misunderstood. He writes that officials say granting Iran the right to keep several thousands centrifuges and a stockpile of nuclear fuel would actually be tougher than one that would give them only a few hundred newer machines and a larger stockpile. But this is a classic Obama false choice in which a straw man is set up for the administration to knock down. What the Israelis and concerned members of Congress who support the threat of more sanctions want is for the president to keep his 2012 campaign pledge that stated that any deal would involve the end of Iran’s nuclear program. The administration has abandoned that position in favor of one that gives Iran the ability to build a bomb but only under circumstances that would take more than a year for them to “break out” to a weapon.
The problem with the one-year breakout offer is that there is a good argument to be made by the Israelis and others that the breakout period would be much shorter. Moreover, the idea that U.S. intelligence in Iran is good enough to detect the breakout in time to do something to prevent is, to put it mildly, a dubious assumption.
American officials may be angry about the fact that the Israelis are doing their best to publicize the details about American offers to Iran that make it clear that, at best, the U.S. is prepared to acquiesce to Khamenei’s regime becoming a threshold nuclear power. But, like their much publicized hurt feelings about Netanyahu’s speech to Congress that they’ve used to pick off wavering Democrats from the ranks of supporters of more sanctions, their umbrage about the Israeli disclosures rings false. The more we know about Obama’s communications with Khamenei and the fine print in the Western offers in the nuclear negotiations, the more it seems certain that détente is the president’s goal, not putting an end to Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Disputes with Israel are being used as a cover to shield a diplomatic offensive aimed at allowing Iranian hegemony in the Middle East. If the president expects the country and Congress to follow his lead on Iran, it’s only fair to ask where he is leading us before, rather than after, he signs a nuclear deal that endangers U.S. allies and puts American security in the hands of the supreme leader and his terrorist auxiliaries.
“… in an effort to forge” a relationship with Iran. What effort? There’s a de facto alliance now!
Look at the evidence . We are doing everything to enhance Iran’s role in the area. We have given Iran a pass over their nuclear capability. We have let Assad annihilate the Free Syrian Army. Yemen’s a failure. Assad’s back as a permanent player. Egypt is lost, and leaning toward Russia.
It is impossible to find any instance in which we have actually and overtly opposed Iran’s hegemonic ambitions, nor disrupted its terror operations. Iran will have the bomb shortly, and nuclear proliferation will be a consequence, with the risk of nuclear weapons falling into the hands of non-state actors.
Is there any reason whatsoever that we will not end up with a faux agreement which pretends to stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons? No.
Just look at what Obama said, “..if we don’t have the framework of an agreement”—not an agreement, but a “framework”. Now, add a couple of years of extensions, or the building of a bomb, which ever comes first. And, that’s our policy.
I would think that any agreements or arrangements Obama makes expire in January 2017 . Other than they are presented to the Senate and are ratified by the Senate as treaties entered into by the United States , they have no validity after O leaves office and are only personal undertakings by O until that time . The damage such arrangements might produce in the meantime might be substantial but said arrangements would not survive O’s term of office when The Long Nightmare comes to an end .
Unless we have another nightmare: Hilliary
I do not believe that Obama has America’s best interests at heart. At a minimum he wants to place America on an equal footing with the rest of the world.
It may suit his ideology but not his oath of office. His charge is to be an advocate for America, not all mankind.
All of this to say that President Obama will be out of office as the rest of us, Israel and the US included, must deal with the madness of permitting genocidal terrorists to possess the immediate ability to manufacture nuclear weapons. Where is the discussion about the fact that Iran is the world’s number one sponsor of terrorism? They invest their time and treasure in spreading their evil influence against equally committed forms of violent, repressive Sunni groups (but also Israel and the US). The US must use every means at her disposal to sanction Iran and effect regime change by internal means. If that fails, they must be brought down by force. Override Obama!
Jonathan Tobin, as he says in his walkback from previously calling the March 3 address to Congress a “tactical blunder” and it was only until the revelations in the Wall St. Journal on the secret letters between Khameini and Obama, that now requires that the Prime Minister open the windows to allow the dangers that the present deal presents. Below is the response I sent on February 6 to Tobin’s ususlly perspicacious analyses to be in error.
“I usually agree with Jonathan Tobin, but I take issue with his conclusions here. Left to his own devises, President Obama will allow Iran to get the bomb. His apparent strategy is to cement relations with the eschatological Khamenei regime as he views them as the “strong horse” in the Middle East who will finally destroy the last century old vestiges of the western colonialists (which includes Israel) and the Sunni Arab monarchies. He is being used by the clever Iranians in the role of Lenin’s “useful fool” and will be discarded by them after they set off their first successful test in the Iranian “Los Alamos” desert. The implications for the world are enormous. The Persian Gulf will become a Persian hegemony with the Strait of Hormuz an Iranian checkpoint. The flow of oil could be cut off at any time and the price of hydrocarbons could be pressured to unimaginable heights. The ICBMs they are developing will allow them to threaten all the states in the west including the United States. They have already spread their tentacles without a bomb across much of the eastern Mediterranean. As a nuclear power there will be an exponential increase in their ability to impose their will. A global caliphate will become a more realistic goal at this point.
Netanyahu’s decision to cancel his March 3 address to Congress as Tobin suggests would be a terrible mistake. This important trip is a greatly magnified Paul Revere alert. By all indications Iran is not far from completing its goal of becoming a nuclear power. Any opportunity to explain to the American Congress and more importantly to the American people and the global airwaves at this eleventh hour must be taken. He will have had sufficient time to craft an outstanding presentation that will be easily comprehended by all. Hitler could have been easily stopped in 1936. If a Churchill could have rebutted Neville Chamberlain’s trip to Munich and convinced FDR to join England in thwarting the Third Reich, the more than 60 million deaths in World War Two would have been greatly reduced. We are facing an even greater apocalypse in 2015 if Iran is not stopped now. Crippling sanctions can bring the Iranian regime to its knees very quickly. Waiting for 2017 when another president will occupy the White House as Tobin suggests will be much too late. Making a political football out of this issue is playing small ball when without exaggeration the future of western civilization is at a crossroad. To put this in the context of “ Bibi playing chicken with the Democrats” is missing the forest. President Obama is not a dithering Hamlet in any way. He has a strategy that in his view of the world will benefit the great majority, especially of the oppressed.. It is a terribly flawed strategy that is bringing his nation to the edge of an abyss that has the specter of a mushroom cloud in the offing in the ravine below.”
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