Post-American Presidency
Page 16
All right, so he was “troubled.” Or the American people were. Many were not only troubled, but horrified at the murder of Neda Agha-Soltan, the beautiful young woman who was shot dead by the mullahs’ thugs on a street in Tehran. But in fact there were many Neda Agha-Soltans. The most visible feature of the Iranian protest movement was the leadership role of the women in Iran. They were the heart, soul, and fuel of that defiance in the face of crushing repression.
But Barack Obama did not stand with Neda Agha-Soltan. He did not stand with any of the Iranian women who put their lives on the line for freedom during that first summer of his presidency.
What did Obama choose to do when he became “troubled” by the ferocious crackdown on political dissent in Iran? Give his public support to the democracy movement? Call for restraint from the mullahs in dealing with the protesters, and justice in the Iranian election?
Barack Hussein Obama chose to do none of those things.
Instead, he reiterated his desire to talk with the Iranian leaders who were coordinating the bloody crackdown against their own people: “We will continue to pursue a tough direct dialogue between our two countries.”26
And those terrified, courageous souls marched through Tehran, acting out in hope that it might effect any change. They were engaged in an exercise in futility, courtesy of Barack Hussein Obama. It was an opportunity missed.
Not that the Iranian elections really would have changed anything in and of themselves. The allegations of fixed elections came after polls showed that half of the electorate wanted Ahmadinejad. But if half of the electorate wanted this bloodthirsty jihadi annihilationist, then what led to all the unrest? Hundreds of thousands of people turned out at rallies for Ahmadinejad before the election. The election was a ruse. As Christopher Booker wrote in The Telegraph, “The reality is that this was a completely sham battle between rival factions of a regime as ruthless as any in the world, in which the real power is exercised by the gang of hard-line mullahs round the ‘Supreme Leader’, Ali Khamenei. In an election riddled with fraud (six million more ballot papers were printed than there are Iranians eligible to vote), all four regime-approved candidates had long been personally involved in the regime’s murderous reign of terror.”27
Opposition candidate Mir Hussein Mousavi, although he had always been a faithful servant of the mullahcracy, positioned himself as a reformer. It was shaping up to be a first-class piece of political theater: the “reformer” would win, and would con the UN and the president while finishing their extensive, comprehensive nuclear-weapons program. Not one nuke, not two nukes. Many nukes. The world wanted so desperately to be fooled. And so the “new” Iranian president would “engage” in a “new era,” “new dialogue,” and “diplomacy,” to Obama’s delight.
Many people (including Barack Obama) pointed out that Mousavi was in reality scarcely different from Ahmadinejad. After his numerous overtures to the mullahs, it wasn’t hard to know why Obama appeared to be hoping the opposition would be crushed.
But there were numerous signs that many of the Iranian protesters were not fighting for Mir Hussein Mousavi.
The resistance to the Iranian regime that the world witnessed in the summer and fall of 2009, with young people risking torture and death, was not about installing Mousavi as president. The Iranians were given four choices; it was not as if they could write in Ronald Reagan’s name. But what might a regime change, or even a modification of the regime with someone like Mousavi as president, have meant to Iran’s nuclear program? If the Iranian demonstrators had not been crushed, it is anyone’s guess how many of the strictures of the Islamic Republic they might ultimately have thrown off—after all, Iran was a relatively secular state until 1979.
Clearly a significant number of the protesters have been fighting for freedom from the Islamic Republic and the stifling restrictions of Sharia itself. Some attitudes are entrenched in people and cultures, but I do not believe that people fight bullets with rocks and bricks for more of the same. They already had Sharia rule, without the suffering and horror that came with the demonstrations. Even Sheikh Naim Qassem, the deputy leader of Hizbullah, the jihad terror group that is Iran’s client in Lebanon, noticed that. “What is going on in Iran,” he said in June 2009, “is not a simple protest against the results of the presidential election. There are riots and attacks in the streets that are orchestrated from the outside in a bid to destabilize the country’s Islamic regime.”28
Would people who are fighting simply to install a different president in a strict Sharia state that is viciously hostile to Israel appeal for help from the country they hate the most? Yet Iranian dissident Arash Irandoost asked for help from… Israel: “Dear Israeli Brothers and Sisters, Iran needs your help more than ever now.” He argued that Israel and the Iranian freedom fighters faced a common foe: “The unjust treatment and brutal massacre of the brave Iranians in the hands of the mullahs’ paid terrorist Hamas and Hizbullah gangs are not seen by the majority of the Iranians.”29
The Iranian people were dying for their aspirations. As Arash Irandoost’s appeal suggests, those aspirations do not include the destruction of America or Israel. The freedom fighters were trying to travel an uphill road against a cruel, vicious theocracy and a huge fundamentalist peasantry. They fought and they died tragically—and magnificently and bravely, trying to better their society.
It is a stain on America’s great history as a force for good that we elected a president who gave tacit support to murderers and savages, and abandoned those dying for freedom.
If Obama had thrown his support to the demonstrators and the Islamic regime had been toppled, the new president would need the West as a bulwark in his defenses against a resurgence of Islamic supremacism. He might have bowed to pressure from the Iranian people for a relaxation of Sharia rule and a return to something like the way Iranian society was under the shah. This could have led him to moderate Iran’s foreign adventures also: no bomb, and perhaps no Syria, Hizbullah, and Abbas as proxies by which to wage terrorism.
A moderate Iran could have been an enormously stabilizing force in the region. This was why Obama’s failure to seize the moment was so shortsighted and stupid.
The Green Revolution, like the Cedar Revolution (Lebanon), the Rose Revolution (Georgia), and all those purple fingers were the manifestation of an idea, an idea that men yearned for: liberty and freedom. And while not everyone wants freedom, those who do ought to be given their inalienable human rights: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The Iranians who were taking bullets, axe blows, and the crushing blows of batons were those very people. And these courageous and desperately isolated people deserved the wholehearted support of all free people.
CHANGE, BUT NO HOPE: ENDING FUNDING FOR IRANIAN FREEDOM
According to “Iran: U.S. Concerns and Policy Responses,” a Congressional Research Service report dated May 19, 2009, Barack Obama hung the Iranian democracy protesters out to dry in the 2010 budget.30 The report detailed $67 million that was set aside during the Bush administration to promote democracy in Iran. “Of that, as of October 2008,” according to the report, “$42.7 million has been obligated, and $20.8 million disbursed.” It adds that more money had also been “appropriated for cultural exchanges, public diplomacy, and broadcasting to Iran.”
But all that changed when Barack Obama became president: “However, the Obama Administration did not request funding for democracy promotion in Iran in its FY2010 budget request, an indication that the new Administration views this effort as inconsistent with its belief in dialogue with Iran.”31
Could the mullahs have asked for a better friend?
Obama not only passed up a chance to speak up for the brave Iranian citizens who dared to take their lives in their hands and protest the Iranian regime. He not only ended funding for the promotion of democracy in Iran. He also abandoned them to their fate by cutting off funding for a watchdog group that monitored human-rights violations inside Iran, the Iran Human Rights
Documentation Center.32
The Iran Human Rights Documentation Center had received over $3 million from the State Department between 2004 and 2009, and used it to document the human-rights abuses—notably the torture of political prisoners and the murder of pro-democracy activists and dissenters—perpetrated by the Islamic Republic. Executive Director Renee Redman had requested $2.7 million to fund the group’s work for two more years, only to find the request summarily and inexplicably denied.
Redman was shocked, since the denial came just as the whole world had seen the Iranian regime’s brutality and ruthlessness in dealing with the election protesters. “If there is one time that I expected to get funding, this was it,” said Redman. “I was surprised, because the world was watching human rights violations right there on television.”
But with no funding, the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center was set to shut its doors in May 2010.
The Obama administration also cut off funds to at least three other Iranian organizations that opposed the Islamic Republic and had received funding during the Bush administration. Roya Boroumand of the Boroumand Foundation, an anti–death penalty group, articulated why the Obama approach was so spectacularly wrong: “If the rationale is that we are going to stop funding human rights–related work in Iran because we don’t want to provoke the government, it is absolutely the wrong message to send. That means that we don’t really believe in human rights, that the American government just looks into it when it is convenient.”33
Indeed. And for whatever reason, Barack Obama never seemed to find it convenient to confront Iran’s Islamic regime about its miserable human-rights record.
IRAN’S MAN IN WASHINGTON
In November 2009, Obama appointed John Limbert as deputy assistant secretary for Iran in the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs. According to a report at Politico, an unnamed State Department official with twenty years of service in the department said that before Limbert’s appointment, “we’ve never had a DAS for Iran.” Limbert, he said, would be “the most senior official at State who deals exclusively with Iran.”34
At first glance it seemed like a savvy appointment. Limbert was a hostage in the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1979, and a fluent Farsi speaker. There is video of Limbert discussing the hostages’ plight with the future Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei. A career diplomat, Limbert has received the highest award that the State Department gives out, the Distinguished Service Award. He is the author of a book entitled Negotiating with Iran: Wrestling with the Ghosts of History.
Who, then, would be better to navigate the twists and turns of dealing with the mullahs for a president who is intent on negotiating with them, and will not be dissuaded from this goal?
There was just one catch: Limbert was a member of the advisory board of the George Soros–funded National Iranian American Council (NIAC), a powerful Iranian lobbying group in Washington that boasts of its connections in high places: “Throughout the recent crisis,” the NIAC announced in July 2009, at the height of the bloody crackdown on the demonstrators in Tehran, “NIAC has been in contact with the White House almost daily to convey the views of our community, and policymakers have been listening.” It “strongly condemned the crackdown” in Iran “and called for new elections as the best way to end the violence.” It has also called upon the mullahs to “immediately release opposition figures, human rights defenders, and all other persons arrested for contesting the election results,” as well as “immediately halt state-sanctioned violence against the Iranian people.”35
The NIAC’s boasting was not misplaced. As the organization itself put it, “since its inception in 2002, NIAC has grown to become the largest Iranian-American grassroots organization in the country, with supporters in all 50 states.”36
That the largest Iranian-American advocacy group in the country would stand against the Iranian regime’s repression of the Iranian demonstrations was welcome. However, for all its apparent advocacy of freedom for Iranians, the NIAC consistently opposed the tough measures that would truly aid genuine fighters for freedom in Iran—and also opposed the steps that the United States, Israel, and the West must take to defend themselves against the increasingly bellicose and brutal Islamic Republic.
The NIAC has consistently followed a line indicating that while it opposes the mullahs’ excesses, it does not oppose the Islamic regime itself. For example, some time ago it published statements from an Islamic cleric and former government official under Khomeini, Haddi Ghaffari. “Khamenei,” Ghaffari wrote, addressing Iran’s Supreme Leader, “your recent actions and behavior has brought shame to us clerics.… Khamenei, you are wrong, your actions are wrong.”
Sounds great, right? Sure. But then Ghaffari added: “I’m not preaching these messages so that I could be associated with the West. I loathe the West and will fight to the last drop of my blood before I or my land succumbs to the West.”37 In other words, he would fight to the last drop of his blood to make sure that the bloody Sharia rule of the mullahs does not end.
This is the organization that John Limbert serves as a member of its advisory board.
The NIAC has also criticized journalist Kenneth Timmerman for equating “opposition to a U.S.-Iran war with support for the Iranian government. Nothing could be further from the truth,” the group proclaims. “NIAC believes that Iranian Americans are double-stakeholders in attempts to avoid war—as Americans, they don’t want to see a single American life lost, and as Americans of Iranian descent, they don’t want to see their friends and family in Iran getting bombed.”38
Did German-Americans complain in 1943 that they didn’t want to see their friends and family back in the old Nazi homeland getting bombed? “The images of the devastation in Iraq,” NIAC maintained, “should serve as a deterrent against prospective wars in the region. In this, NIAC agrees with the Iraq Study Group’s recommendations that diplomacy, not military confrontation should be the way to resolve U.S.-Iran tensions.”39
Of course, Barack Obama couldn’t have agreed more. And as we have seen, he also agreed that, as NIAC’s Trita Parsi put it, “imposing new sanctions prior to diplomacy having begun will only decrease the chances of successful diplomacy.”40
The NIAC has opposed sanctions for quite some time. Iranian dissident Hassan Daioleslam notes that “in 2008, when [the] U.S. Congress was showing some teeth to the Iranian regime,” a coalition of Islamic groups, antiwar groups, and others founded the Campaign for New American Policy on Iran to fight against new sanctions against Iran called for by the advisory resolution H.R. 362. This resolution was not passed, and “NIAC and Parsi,” says Daioleslam, “were on top of this event.”41
No strike on Iran. No sanctions. Just diplomacy—with a genocidally inclined and fanatically intransigent regime whose contempt for Obama’s overtures made the president look increasingly beggarly as the first year of his presidency wore on.
It was no mystery why many wondered which side the NIAC is really on. But as long as it continued to wield such influence in Washington and held the ear of Barack Obama and John Limbert, the freedom fighters in Tehran didn’t stand a chance.
SANCTIONS? WHAT SANCTIONS?
The Congressional Research Service report notes that “the Bush Administration characterized Iran as a ‘profound threat to U.S. national security interests,’ a perception generated primarily by Iran’s nuclear program and its military assistance to armed groups in Iraq and Afghanistan, to the Palestinian group Hamas, and to Lebanese Hezbollah.”
“The U.S. approach,” the report goes on, “was to try to prevent a nuclear breakout by Iran by applying multilateral economic pressure on Iran while also offering it potential cooperation should it comply with the international demands to suspend its enrichment of uranium.”
Whether or not the sanctions worked, they were the only weapon the West was using to try to put pressure on the mullahs. However, “the Obama Administration has not pushed assertively for new sanctions, pending the results of its outreach to Iran.�
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In fact, not only did the post-American president not push for new sanctions; he actively opposed them. In October 2009, Jonathan Schanzer, a former Treasury Department terror expert, noted that “legislators are growing increasingly frustrated with President Barack Obama’s seeming unwillingness to pull the trigger on an Iran sanctions package that is already locked and loaded.” Schanzer was referring to the Iran Refined Petroleum Sanctions Act (IRPSA), which would have impeded foreign oil companies from helping Iran with oil production. “In short,” Schanzer explained, “IRPSA could deal a fiscal body blow to Iran and destabilize the regime, as a means to derail its nuclear ambitions.”43
Obama, however, dragged his feet, despite overwhelming support for the measure in Congress—perhaps because if the IRPSA failed, the only remaining option would be to deal with the Iranians with military force.
And that was one option that Barack Hussein Obama absolutely refused to consider.
Apparently Obama believed that simply by showing the Iranians some love, he could persuade them to drop their genocidal bellicosity and join the ranks of free nations. And no amount of rejection and scorn would disabuse him of this notion.
That was bad enough. But Obama’s dithering about the Iranian nuclear program was even worse.
LETTING IRAN GET AWAY WITH MURDER
In late September 2009 the United States, in conjunction with Britain and France, revealed that Iran was building a nuclear-fuel plant that the Iranians had up to that point kept secret. Several weeks later, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors were given a look inside the facility.
American diplomat Marc Ginsberg, the former U.S. ambassador to Morocco, remarked acidly: “We now have definitive confirmation from IAEA and European diplomats that the nuclear installation was too small for peaceful nuclear enrichment, but large enough to hold enough centrifuges to convert low grade enriched uranium into enough weapons-grade uranium needed to make nuclear warheads. In other words, the Qum nuclear facility appears to be the smoking gun in Iran’s secret nuclear weapons construction program. If the neutral IAEA has come to that conclusion, I can’t wait to hear from those who would love to spin it as nothing more than an innocent doughnut factory.”44