Post-American Presidency (22 page)

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.”
⁴²

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

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