There’s an underlying point in the Washington Post editorial on the agreement the Obama Administration is negotiating with Iran. There’s a legitimate concern that the administration is kicking the legs out from beneath the bipartisan strategy that has guided U. S. policy with respect to Iran for the last 35 years:
he president himself has provided much of the fuel for the speculation. According to news accounts, Mr. Obama has dispatched four private letters to the Iranian supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The most recent one, in October, assured the ayatollah that the United States would not attack Iranian forces or those of its Syrian ally in operations against the Islamic State, according to the Wall Street Journal. Publicly, Mr. Obama said in an interview in December that he hoped a nuclear deal “would serve as the basis for us trying to improve relations over timeâ€; if Iran agreed to the accord, he added, it could become “a very successful regional power.â€
Such statements have understandably alarmed Mideast leaders at a time when Tehran is engaged in what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called a “march of conquest, subjugation and terror.†A relaxation of U.S. efforts to resist this bid for regional hegemony would be a strategic calamity for Israel and the Persian Gulf states. Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal said after speaking to Mr. Kerry that it was “really the main concern of the Gulf Cooperation Council.â€
Unfortunately, the administration’s assurances are at odds with its actions. While the nuclear negotiations have continued, Mr. Obama has refused to support military action against the Assad regime in Syria, in accord with his letter’s reported promise, and his administration has tacitly blessed an ongoing, Iranian-led offensive in Iraq’s Sunni heartland. It took no action to stop the ouster by an Iranian-backed militia of a pro-U.S. Yemeni regime. Nor has it reacted to Iran’s deployment of thousands of Shiite fighters to southern Syria, near the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.
That record raises the question of what the administration’s response will be to further Iranian adventurism following a nuclear deal.
I doubt the administration has thought that far ahead. I think they’re too busy keeping score.
Yeah, Dave there is no way Obama would do anything on purpose to meaningfully hurt Israel. I’m sure Israel’s ultimate certain demise will be effected as much by a combination of Arab-Iranian-Islamic powers keeping relentless heat on and the criminal but inept American imperial elite class botching it’s way out of the Mideast.
I strongly suspect that’s a closer approximation of the truth than the view, prevalent in some circles, that the president is some sort of crypto-Muslim intent on destroying Israel.
And here I thought the bipartisan plan was to let Iraq counterbalance Iran. Once that was gone I thought we had no plan and it was very clear that we had greatly expanded Iran’s sphere of influence.. I have no desire to conflate Israel’s plan (keep everyone else on their knees) with our own, and since a big chunk of the article discusses Netanyahu’s plans, but not clearly our own, that seems like what we are seeing here. Just exactly what bipartisan plan does anyone think we have had regarding Iran since 2003? Hell, can anyone articulate any plan at all?
Steve
“There’s a legitimate concern that the administration is kicking the legs out from beneath the bipartisan strategy that has guided U. S. policy with respect to Iran for the last 35 years”
That administration would be the GW Bush administration, not this one. The strategy over the last 35 years to contain Iran hinged on maintaining a balance of power between Iran and the other Arab states, primarily Iraq. Defeating Saddam and breaking “Iraq” apart helped Iran more than anyone else and is what destroyed our containment strategy. Pat Lang explains better than I can why Iraq is not likely to be united again anytime soon, so Iraq cannot be rebuilt as a counter to Iran.
Not that the Obama administration didn’t make the situation worse. But I wonder what the editors of the Wapo are smoking. And really, this just shows how ignorant they are:
So let’s dissect this a little:
– Syria. As I recall the Obama administration was perfectly willing to attack Assad but they saw the lack of public and Congressional support and so decided to ask for authorization and never got it. And really, what would attacking Assad accomplish besides putting Islamists in control of even more of Syria? Oh yeah, they probably expect those unicorn-rare Syrian moderates to take over the country.
– The Iranian-led offensive in Iraq. Have they not been paying attention? It’s been clear for a LONG time that “Iraq’s” government is friendly with Iran. What does the Wapo suggest we do about that? Oh yeah, they want us to play the war of the flea again in Iraq.
– We took no action to stop the Huthi’s from taking Sanaa’ in Yemen? Well, what do they think we should have done? They don’t have a clue about the complexity of Yemen’s internal politics or even its recent history. Maybe they should google up North and South Yemen and compare the map to today and maybe put two-and-two together.
-We haven’t reacted to shiite fighters in Syria. Ok, what are we supposed to do? They are near the Golan – so what? Are they going to storm Israeli tanks on the heights? The main reason they are there is because they are fighting ISIS who took a bunch of territory south of Damascus. So, are we supposed to help ISIS take over the territory near the Golan?
I mean, I expect cluelessness from the editorial boards of major newspapers, but this is a new low.
Whatever their belief, the reality is that the balance-of-power check on Iran is gone and I don’t see it coming back. The Arab countries that remain cannot really play that role, nor would we want them to because what they’ll do is simply throw money at radical Sunni Islamists. Unlike the Iranians, they have no ability to build a political community out of a fighting force.
Just to clarify my view I think our strategy in the Middle East has been in disarray for slightly more than 35 years and I blame the Carter Administration. Back then we had something called the “Twin Pillars” strategy. The short version is that we depended on our allies, Saudi Arabia and Iran, to maintain stability in the region. Then came the Iranian Revolution in which we decided the Shah was just too nasty to keep in power, rather reminiscent of the attitude towards Mubarak in Egypt more recently. No more Shah, no more Shi’a-Sunni equilibrium and we now have two hostile powers, Iraq and Iran, to contend with. Fortunately, they kept each other busy for the better part of the next decade.
Since then our strategy could be summarized as military build-up just short of actual occupation and the rest, as they say, is history.
Just to clarify my view I think our strategy in the Middle East has been in disarray for slightly more than 35 years and I blame the Carter Administration.
Whatever the sins of the Carter Administration, they can hardly be held responsible for the policy failings of the next five (and counting!) Administrations.
So, you think the Reagan Administration should have gone to war with Iran to re-install the Shah? Letting the Shah go was a serious error on the Carter Administration’s part. There had been previous attempted Islamist uprisings in Iran. The 1979 revolution was the first in which the Shah was considered expendable. There wouldn’t have been a peep from the Soviet Union. They were busy elsewhere.
Send in our troops to reinstall the Shah? Not at all.
But 35 years is a long enough time to create a new strategy. That’s enough time to start and finish two world wars, destroy several empires, properly start the international system, create and destroy Fascist & Nazi empires, expand the Communist Empire to include half of humanity, and create and destroy an entire Co-Prosperity Sphere while planting the seeds for the final destruction of the remaining European empires.
Not to mention throwing in Prohibition, the Great Depression, the invention of the bulk of Quantum Mechanics, the discovery of penicillin, & Zoot suits just for fun. Surely five Administrations between them, plus the bulk of the US foreign policy apparatus, should have been able to come up with something by now.
In seems unfair to blame 35+ years of ineptitude on Carter. There’s plenty of blame to go around.
Carter made mistakes, but I’m not sure he had the power to keep the Shah in power.
OT: Schuler, have you seen any articles about the ‘suicide’ wave amongst officials of the deposed Ukrainian regime? Apparently at least seven have (according to the new regime) committed suicide since the start of the year, one by shooting himself in the neck, which was a new method to me. Of course, the current regime sees no pattern in this at all, and thinks everything is completely above board.
Well, a more salient comment than my original-Middle Eastern
“Arabs-in the street,” Turks also, if not their governments, majority poll as favoring Iran get the bomb, to offset Israel’s. So much for the real Sunni-Shia divide when it comes to the Zionists.
Notice also Dave is quite content to implicitly sanction the imperialist overthrow of Mossadegh which led to the Shah’s glorified balance act of which he then approved.
“– Syria. As I recall the Obama administration was perfectly willing to attack Assad but they saw the lack of public and Congressional support and so decided to ask for authorization and never got it.”
No, Putin checkmated it and bailed Obama out. Obama has actually drone bombed more innocents than ISIS has killed thus far, according to a journalist at http://www.neo.org.
Now that I bring Russia into the mix, the dirty little secret for the fans of Anglo-Zionist police states, like that residing in Washington, is that if the USSR’s post-Stalinist funded and trained “rejectionist bloc” of Arab socialists would have freed Palestine, the Middle East would be far more functional and peaceful today.
http://journal-neo.org/
Correct link.
We’ve discussed the overthrow of the Mossadegh government at length here. It wasn’t an “imperialist overthrow”. If you think it was, please present evidence. It was a putsch by Iranian military officers, approved of by both Britain and the U. S., a somewhat different thing.
At the time it wasn’t a choice between Mossadegh and the Shah or even the Islamists and the Shah. Mossadegh’s government was already collapsing. It was a choice between the Soviet-supported Iranian Communist Party, the Tudeh, and the Shah. Please present evidence that the people of Iran would have been better off with Iran as a Soviet republic.
What you’re doing is parroting back Soviet disinformation.