Post-American Presidency

by Spencer, Robert; Geller, Pamela

  Barack Obama was almost certainly one of them, but such spin wasn’t possible in the face of such flagrant flouting of international law. A clearly annoyed Obama talked tough: “The size and configuration of this facility is inconsistent with a peaceful (nuclear) program,” he said, in remarks more critical of Iran than he had ever made before. “Iran is breaking rules that all nations must follow, endangering the global nonproliferation regime, denying its own people access to the opportunity they deserve, and threatening the stability and security of the region and the world.”45 He thundered that this secret plant constituted “a serious challenge to the global nonproliferation regime, and continues a disturbing pattern of Iranian evasion.” He said that Iran “must pursue a new course or face consequences.”

  What kind of consequences? A strike on its nuclear facilities? No. A defiant Iran, predicted Obama, will put the mullahs in a situation in which they “will face increased pressure and isolation, and deny opportunity to their own people.” He invited the Iranian leadership to a “serious, meaningful dialogue,” provided that Iran “take actions to demonstrate its peaceful intentions.” And he begged once again, intoning plaintively: “My offer of a serious, meaningful dialogue to resolve this issue remains open.”46

  When asked at a press conference about the disclosure of the existence of this second Iranian nuclear facility, which some of Obama’s advisers were terming a “victory,” Obama was dismissive: “This isn’t a football game,” he declared, “so I’m not interested in victory; I’m interested in resolving the problem.”47

  Of course, Obama considered himself to be an enlightened sophisticate who has moved beyond the primitive warlike tendencies of bygone cultures and civilizations. He is a twenty-first-century man, and he is confident that underneath it all, Khamenei and Ahmadinejad are too, and aren’t any more interested in victory than Barack Obama is.

  A rude awakening was certain to come.

  GENEVA: OBAMA SURRENDERS TO THE MULLAHS

  Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, and its president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, responded to Barack Obama’s overtures with scorn and contempt. But that didn’t mean that Iran had no interest whatsoever in talking. The mullahs were happy to send their representatives to talk to the infidels when they perceived a clear advantage in doing so. But they signaled their continuing defiance by testing a few short-range missiles just before the talks. On that occasion the leader of the Revolutionary Guard Air Force, Gen. Hossein Salami, issued a general threat: “We are going to respond to any military action in a crushing manner, and it doesn’t make any difference which country or regime has launched the aggression.”48

  With Iran’s in-your-face stance thus established, on October 1, 2009, Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator, Saeed Jalili, went to Geneva for talks on Iran’s nuclear ambitions with negotiators from the United States, Russia, China, Great Britain, France, and Germany.

  At the same time, a high-level U.S. diplomat, whose identity was not revealed, met one-on-one with Jalili to discuss Tehran’s nuclear ambitions.49 The results of the meeting were not disclosed, but enough damage was done by the fact of the meeting itself. The signal this meeting sent was nothing less than disastrous: what do you get for being a rogue regime that builds renegade nuclear weapons, slaughters its own people, hijacks an election and illegally seizes power, sows the seeds of war and destruction in neighboring countries, uses foreign proxies to attack free nations, kills U.S. soldiers in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan, creates Hizbullah, funds and backs Hamas, and promises a second holocaust?

  With Barack Obama as president, you get a clampdown on those who are reporting your nefarious activities, and a one-on-one with the United States for the first time in decades.

  The meeting with the six nations was even worse. Significantly, during the seven-and-a-half-hour meeting with the six powers, none of those powers asked Jalili what they had asked Iran to do before: give up its nuclear ambitions. No one said a word about sanctions, either.

  The Iranians were, understandably, jubilant. And they did not see the meeting as movement toward a compromise, but as the humiliation of their powerful enemies. The influential Ayatollah Seyyed Ahmad Khatami said in a Friday sermon: “The meeting was a great victory for the Islamic Republic of Iran to such an extent that even the Western and Zionist media had to admit defeat.”50

  Ambassador Bolton agreed with Khatami: “In fact, the agreement constitutes another in the long string of Iranian negotiating victories over the West. Any momentum toward stricter sanctions has been dissipated, and Iran’s fraudulent, repressive regime again hobnobs with the U.N. Security Council’s permanent members.”

  Bolton also pointed out that the meeting had facilitated Iran’s violation of UN Security Council resolutions. “In Resolution 1696, adopted July 31, 2006,” Bolton explained, “the Security Council required Iran to ‘suspend all enrichment-related and reprocessing activities, including research and development.’” But in Geneva, Iran and the six powers came to an “‘agreement in principle’ to send approximately one nuclear-weapon’s worth of Iran’s low enriched uranium (LEU) to Russia for enrichment to 19.75% and fabrication into fuel rods for Tehran’s research reactor.”

  And despite his internationalist respect for the United Nations, Obama did not reject the “agreement in principle” between Iran and Russia. Instead, said Bolton, “Obama says the deal represents progress, a significant confidence-building measure.”51

  Whose confidence was being built? “The issue with most rogue states, like Iran, like North Korea, is that by talking to them you are giving them legitimacy and you’re also giving them time, which proliferators need,” said Bolton back in March 2008.52

  Ultimately Iran rejected the deal that the UN brokered on its nuke program, although Obama remained mum about the rejection for understandable reasons. He knew what it would show about his determination to negotiate with the Iranians “without preconditions.” One colossal failure after another.

  But why would Iran have endorsed this deal?

  WOULD ISRAEL BOMB IRAN?

  Barack Obama in May 2009 warned Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu not to launch a surprise attack on Iran.53 This was an attempt to ensnare Israel in a particularly difficult catch-22, for it was extremely unlikely that Obama would approve of or lend his support to an Israeli strike against Iran before the fact, while a surprise attack could jeopardize Israel’s alliance with the United States.

  The Israelis, however, unlike Obama, were prepared to make hard choices. The chief of staff of the Israeli Defense Force, Gabi Ashkenazi, declared in September 2009: “Israel has the right to defend itself, and all options are open.”54

  Including the option of taking out Iran’s nuclear installations.

  Israel had to act, because a focal point of Iran’s increasing bellicosity was its hatred of Israel. In November 2009, the Israelis intercepted a ship bound for Lebanon, laden with missiles and ammunition sent from Iran to the jihad terrorist group Hizbullah. Former Israeli defense minister Shaul Mofaz explained: “As of now, what we know is that this was a smuggling attempt to arm Hezbollah with terrorist means against civilians. The intent was to send arms, mainly missiles and launchers, meant to strike civilian targets.”55

  The incident underscored the urgency of stopping Iran’s nuclear ambitions. A country that would smuggle conventional weapons to a terrorist group would smuggle nuclear weapons to that terror group as well. But with Barack Obama in the White House, Israel faced hard choices.

  On October 23, 2009, the American Enterprise Institute held a panel discussion entitled “Should Israel Attack Iran?” Dictating the choice of topic was the obvious fact that Barack Hussein Obama, with his ever-outstretched hand, would not attack Iran, no matter how real and present a danger the Iranian nuclear program turned out to be. That left it up to Israel to do the job—if Israel was not to be impeded in that by Obama himself.

  On the panel, Bolton said that force was “required” to keep I
ran from getting nuclear weapons. What about Obama’s outstretched hand? Bolton said that solutions other than taking out Iran’s nuclear facilities “have failed, are failing and will fail.” UN resolutions, he noted, had “no material impact on Iran’s nuclear weapons program,” and “the prospect of sanctions in the future is illusory.… The combination of Russian and Chinese action in the Security Council on any hypothetical fourth resolution would end up watering it down just like the first three.”

  Yet despite the fact that an Israeli strike at Iran’s nuclear facilities could save the free world (and much of the unfree world), Bolton predicted that such an attack would “cause a very dramatic break in the relationship between the Obama administration and Israel.”

  No big surprise there.

  Was there any alternative? Bolton said that “the ideal outcome is regime change”—and never was the Islamic Republic of Iran closer to that possibility than in the summer of 2009 during the demonstrations against the election results.56

  But Barack Obama did nothing. The president was naked at the feast.

  Only Israel was ready to act. Israeli deputy foreign minister Danny Ayalon demonstrated in a November 2009 interview that he was not nearly as overawed by the mullahs as Barack Obama appeared to be. “The one who’s bluffing,” said Ayalon, “is Iran, which is trying to play with cards they don’t have. All the bravado that we see and the testing and the very dangerous and harsh rhetoric are hiding a lot of weaknesses.”57

  Strong words—so unlike Barack Obama’s.

  When I interviewed Ambassador Bolton on July 30, 2009, he said: “For me the real long-term answer to the Iranian nuclear weapons program is a change of regime. Again, not just a change of Ahmadinejad, the overthrow of the Islamic revolution of 1979. If Obama and the United States are not willing to work for that end, then we can count on not just the mullahs being in charge for a long time, but possibly even worse, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, who are more fanatic, more militaristic, and the ones in charge of the nuclear program.”58

  Obama’s missed opportunity looked worse by the minute.

  THE UN WATCHPUPPY

  With an impotent president at the helm of the most powerful country in the world, the powers arrayed against that country behaved as if they had been given a free hand. Obama clung desperately to his naïve belief that if he begged the Iranians often enough, and received with patience their slights, their insults, their slaps to the face, he would eventually be able to blunt the force of their jihad.

  And meanwhile, the Iranians continued to pursue their nuclear aspirations, without any indication whatsoever that Barack Hussein Obama was deterring them from doing so. In fact, at one terrible historic moment at the United Nations, Obama gave the mullahs every reason to believe that he would do nothing to impede their nuclear ambitions. In September 2009, Obama chaired a session of the United Nations Security Council. According to Anne Bayefsky, “he turned it into a summit of heads of state and chose the agenda. He insisted—in the words of the advance American ‘concept paper’—that ‘The Security Council Summit will focus on nuclear non-proliferation and nuclear disarmament broadly and not focus on any specific countries.’ Obama pushed hard for the adoption of a new Security Council resolution, which was passed unanimously, and which never mentions Iran or North Korea.”59

  To speak about nuclear nonproliferation and nuclear disarmament without ever once mentioning Iran and North Korea is only to demonstrate your fear of standing up to either one.

  For the leader of the free world to manifest such fear was disappointing, especially coming when it did. When Obama chaired the Security Council session, it was only weeks after the United Arab Emirates had informed the council that it had taken control of a ship that had been sailing under the flag of the Bahamas and was full of North Korean–made weapons and explosives—bound for Iran in defiance of UN sanctions. The Security Council committee that oversees sanctions wrote to both Tehran and Pyongyang asking for explanations, and received no response.

  Chairing the Security Council, Barack Obama could have challenged the North Koreans and the Iranians about their defiance of the sanctions, as well as about their nuclear programs in general.

  Instead, he only reinforced their perception of him as weak and unwilling to stand up to them.

  In our July 2009 interview Ambassador Bolton spoke critically of “the inexperience and naïveté, really, of the Obama administration.” He said that “statesmanship, if it’s anything, is looking decades into the future trying to identify risks and challenges and opportunities and structuring events as they develop to maximize the opportunities and minimize the risks.”

  But Obama had done nothing like this: “So when you hear Obama during the campaign saying, ‘Well, Iran is a small country… it doesn’t represent a big threat,’ you know that may be true today, with respect to the United States, but Iran [and] North Korea are not small threats to our friends and allies in their area—Japan and South Korea with respect to North Korea, Israel and the Arab states in the Persian Gulf when they look at Iran. And moreover… you have to go longer than just the next six month or twelve months, you have to say, ‘What are the implications for the world at large if Iran gets nuclear weapons?’”

  Bolton continued:

  And it’s not simply the threat of a nuclear Iran, well, that’s bad enough; it’s the consequences of a nuclear Iran. Saudi Arabia will get nuclear weapons, possibly Egypt, possibly Turkey, possibly others in the region, that’s what we mean by proliferation. A nuclear Iran actually leads to a more dangerous, more unstable situation with possibly several nations having small numbers of nuclear weapons, thus increasing the likelihood that somebody is going to use them. So this issue of a nuclear Iran is critical for Israel, the Persian Gulf states in the short term, possibly critical to the world as a whole over a longer period.60

  Barack Obama never showed any signs of having considered any of that. And in March 2009, Ambassador Bolton summed up the weakness of his position: “There is no evidence that Mr. Obama knows substantively how to stop Iran, which senses the palpable vulnerability inherent in his pell-mell rush to the bargaining table. More importantly, his disjointed diplomacy masks a profound strategic disorder, one potentially far more damaging than the photo op urge to shake hands with an Iranian.”61

  INTERNATIONALLY IMPOTENT

  Speaking in Prague, a city that lived under the shadow of the Cold War for decades, Obama in April 2009 unveiled an ambitious plan to divest the world of nuclear weapons and usher in a new era of peace. But, of course, since Obama controlled only the American nuclear arsenal, that was the only one he could dismantle. And he announced his intention to do just that.

  “The United States,” he declared, “has a moral responsibility to act. We cannot succeed in this endeavor alone, but we can lead it, we can start it.” Alone. “I’m not naïve,” he hastened to assure the world, but he certainly gave the impression that he was.

  “To put an end to Cold War thinking,” Obama said, “we will reduce the role of nuclear weapons in our national security strategy, and urge others to do the same.” We will reduce the role of nukes in our own defense, and urge others to do likewise. “We will,” the president added, “begin the work of reducing our arsenal.”62

  Obama’s plan essentially amounted to disarming free, rational nations and allowing rogue nuclear proliferators to run wild—after all, this was the man who said two months after this speech in Prague that oil-rich Iran “has legitimate energy concerns, legitimate aspirations” that made its intention to become a nuclear power reasonable and justifiable.63

  So apparently in Barack Obama’s ideal world, the United States would divest itself of nuclear weapons just as Iran developed the use of nuclear energy, and the United States would trust Iran to abide by international nonproliferation agreements and refrain from weaponizing its new energy source.

  And the international agencies in which Obama placed so much hope only mirrored his i
mpotence. So it was that in November 2009 the International Atomic Energy Agency, universally known as the “UN’s nuclear watchdog,” discovered that the Iranians had conducted tests of a nuclear warhead design that is so advanced, and so top secret, that officially the United States and Britain do not even acknowledge that it exists. But it does exist, and Iran has apparently tested it.

  This was still more unmistakable evidence that the Iranians have been lying to the world for months and years on end as they have repeatedly insisted that their nuclear program is peaceful in intent, and that they have no intention of manufacturing nuclear warheads at all. It was proof of the duplicity and untrustworthiness of the Islamic regime, and of its constituting a danger to Israel (which has repeatedly been threatened by Iranian leaders) and to the world at large.

  It was a challenge, and an opportunity. Obama could have dropped his beggar’s pose and asked the UN for an immediate stiffening of sanctions. He could have put Iran on notice that the United States—not Israel alone—would destroy Iran’s nuclear weapons program before Iran got anywhere close to the capability of sending a nuke into Tel Aviv.

  But Obama still did nothing. The only response came from the IAEA. Brave, fearless, and courageous as ever, the agency asked Iran for… an explanation.64

  That’s it. No sanctions. No condemnation. Certainly no threat of war backed by the will to follow through on that threat if necessary.

  An explanation.