Obama’s Iran Policy Is a Bomb
After what’s happened in Iran in recent days, Obama’s plan is simply impossible.

By Jonah Goldberg


Here is the one immutable fact of Barack Obama’s foreign-policy agenda as it relates to Iran: It’s over. The rule book he came in with is as irrelevant as a tourist guide to the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

If the forces of reform and democracy win, Obama’s plan to negotiate with the regime is moot, for the regime will be gone. And if the forces of reform are crushed into submission by the regime, Obama’s plan is moot, because the regime will still be there.

Politics and decency will simply demand that the world condemn or shun the regime of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei if they come out on top. Even the most soulless realists will be repulsed by the blood on the regime’s collective hands.

Before June 12, Obama’s eagerness to negotiate with Ahmadinejad — ridiculed by his conservative critics — was hailed by the establishment and the Left as proof of his high-minded faith in diplomacy, a healthy antidote to George W. Bush’s allegedly close-minded approach.

But now, if the clerical junta prevails, anyone who shakes Ahmadinejad’s hands will have a hard time washing the blood off his own.

For some reason, Obama cannot fully accept this. In his press conference Tuesday, the president finally condemned the outrages in Iran in terms he should have used a week ago. But he also kept alive the idea that the current Iranian regime could be a fruitful negotiation partner, despite what has already happened in that country. “It’s not too late,” Obama explained, for the regime to negotiate with the international community. He wouldn’t even cancel plans to invite Iranian officials to Fourth of July barbecues at American embassies.

That amounts to tacit approval of the bloodshed and fraud that we’ve already seen and acceptance of the ultimate triumph of the regime. And it won’t work.

According to many analysts, Obama’s still clinging to his hope of talking Iran out of its nuclear program. That’s why he initially said there was little difference between Mir-Hossein Mousavi and Ahmadinejad, and why his recent denunciations only followed similar rhetoric from the Europeans and our own Congress. He just doesn’t want to let go of the diplomacy option.

No doubt this is part of his rationale. But Obama has also made it clear that he sees the elimination of Iran’s nuclear problem not as a stand-alone priority but as one part of his Middle East two-step. His inseparable goal is to also push Israel into a peace settlement with the Palestinians. As an unnamed Iran expert in contact with White House officials told Foreign Policy’s Laura Rozen, “Obama is dedicated to diplomacy in a manner that is almost ideological. . . . He wants to do some stuff in the Middle East over the next eight years. He may not be able to achieve half of them unless he gets this huge piece of the puzzle (Iran) right.”

That “stuff” seems to be some grand Middle East transformation, whereby Obama promises to negotiate away Iran’s nuclear program in return for Israeli movement on an Israeli-Palestinian settlement. In effect, Obama would be using the threat of a nuclear-armed Ahmadinejad as a Medusa’s head to petrify Israelis into concessions.

Whether such a strategy would have worked is open to huge quantities of skepticism. Now, after what’s happened in Iran in recent days, such a plan is simply impossible.

For years, conservatives or, if you prefer, neoconservatives, have said that the Iranian regime can’t be negotiated with. Some emphasized that anti-Americanism is at the core of the regime’s identity. Some noted that Obama-style “open-handed” overtures to Iran were rebuffed. (Obama may have acknowledged U.S. support for the 1953 overthrow of the Mohammed Mossadegh regime in the hope that such frankness would win him goodwill from the regime. But no such goodwill followed Madeleine Albright’s apology in 2000.)

Others pointed to the messianic and conspiratorial zeal that animates Iran’s clerical junta. Many invoked Iran’s steadfast animus toward our ally Israel as well as its sponsorship of “scholarly” Holocaust denial and the more tangible support for Hezbollah and others bent on murdering Jews. Iran’s efforts to derail democracy and stability in Iraq by, among other things, supporting attacks on American troops is also part of the talk-is-folly brief.

None of that was sufficient evidence for Obama, in part because anything associated with Bush’s freedom agenda was deemed absurd and ideologically rigid.

Well, Bush is gone. Obama has extended his hand. And the regime is supplying fresh evidence of the absurdity of his approach. All that’s left for Obama now is to abandon his own ideological rigidity and start over.

— Jonah Goldberg is editor-at-large of National Review Online and the author of Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning.

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Liberals are people that will believe anything twice.

if obama was a american he would have stood up for the people in iran and against the oppression and murder going on in iran.
he should have the cia and special forces actively helping those people and arming them to take their freedom back.
obama..once again . proves himself to be a total piece of human shit.

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everything i print write or show on here is a complete and utter lie..i cant help myself i am a terminal liar..all of this shit is just fiction and made up for entertainment purposes ONLY..

too bad the ObamaTrons will defend him until the ship compleatly sinks just so they dont have to admit that they chose poorly.

then they will say I never really liked him, or I thought he would be different.



.

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Great, thats the thinking that got us in Vietnam and Iraq. Has history taught you nothing???

Why do you find it so hard to believe that some people agree with what he is doing?

Why if you agree with Obama are you instantly a moron, why the attacks? The alternative was McCain!! You think McCain would be doing better? He would not!

Yes McCain probably would have tanked also. Alot of his policies were similar to Obamas. There were other alternatives than McCain.

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Are you stupid or apathetic? I dont know and I dont care

i hate propaganda. email fuckin anderson cooper and bitch if you want to feel important. that way you might get on tv.

some one should shoot him and biden then we start over

very intellectual.^ way to make an argument.... make republicans look even more like extremist douchebags... shallow and pedantic...

its just amazing the lack of insight as if the previous admin went to save any people being killed and persecuted what a joke. so bush went and saved all peoples around the world being killed unjustly how many holocausts go on daily of various proportions at all time under all super the powers rule. look at the big picture. its funny the politicians have won as so many feel its as simple as repub and democrat well it is now.