by Jonathan Tobin
The collapse of President Obama’s daft strategy for “engaging” with the tyrants of Tehran has left his cheering section with some terrible questions. After spending months soft-pedaling Iran’s stolen election, abuse of dissidents, as well as the danger from its funding of terrorists and, of course, the threat from its drive for nuclear weapons, the administration thought it had fixed the problem with the deal it negotiated to have the Iranians ship their enriched uranium out of the country for processing. It was doubtful that the deal would have worked or that the Iranians wouldn’t have cheated. But Tehran’s rejection of the pact that its representatives had negotiated has the Obama camp thoroughly perplexed.
Their problem is that they can’t accept the obvious answer to the question as to why their solution has been sunk. Having been warned by skeptics of engagement that the Iranians’ only objective in negotiations was to prevaricate, the administration now finds itself scrambling for an explanation as to why their goodwill and generous offers have gotten them exactly nowhere. But ready as always with an explanation for their dilemma is the New York Times, which served up a healthy serving of excuses today in an article designed to rationalize both Iran’s stalling and Washington’s failed strategy. The piece, titled “Iran’s Politics Stand in the Way of a Nuclear Deal With the West,” claims that left to his own devices, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would love to ratify the pact and fulfill its requirements. But he can’t, says author Michael Slackman, because Iranian dissidents as well as a pesky school of “pragmatic conservatives” won’t let him get away with it. According to Slackman, liberal foes of the regime such as former presidential candidate Mir Hussein Moussavi, are trying to score points with the public by hammering Ahmadinejad as insufficiently nationalist, while the “pragmatists” to the right of him think he is betraying the Islamist cause by allowing the West to “cheat” Iran.
It is true that no one should imagine that Iran’s “liberals” can be relied upon to push for a change in the country’s confrontational foreign policy or to abandon the quest for nukes. But the idea that Moussavi — whose supporters have been rounded up to be tortured, raped, or murdered in prison or cowed into silence — has much influence on the nuclear decision-making process seems to fly in the face of everything we know about the country. As for those “pragmatists,” it isn’t likely that they would buck the nation’s “supreme leader,” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, whose control over Ahmadinejad has never been questioned. After the regime’s display this past summer of how it deals with dissidents, how can we be expected to believe that the rejection of the nuclear deal has been stopped by “politics”? If Khamenei and the other mullahs that run the country wanted the confrontation with the West resolved by this deal, there’s no question it would soon be signed, sealed, and delivered.
What then is to be done? The hint comes from one of Slackman’s sources, Flynt Leverett, the director of the Iran project at the leftist New America Foundation, who seems to be our nation’s current academic appeaser in chief on all things Iranian. Leverett, whose voice has been raised against virtually every measure aimed at stopping Iran’s nuclear program, claims that the loathsome Ahmadinejad really “wants to cooperate with the international community in developing its civil nuclear program, but only under conditions that respect the Islamic republic’s economic and security interests.”
In other words, having already been played for a sucker by Ahmadinejad on enriched uranium, Obama now needs to make more concessions to the Iranians to satisfy their “political” needs. Leverett is right about the next step Tehran wants the United States to take. Having raised the ante, they want the Americans to continue bidding against themselves. But their goal isn’t a sweeter deal but a process that drags the negotiations out indefinitely until Iran’s nuclear progress becomes irreversible.
The problem for Obama is that the countdown to Iranian nuclear capability continues while his engagement policy is hopelessly bogged down. This is something that our European allies seem to sense. Both the French and the Germans are pushing for a harder line on Iran, but they can do nothing without American leadership on the issue. While the Times and the administration may prefer to ponder the intricacies of Iranian politics in order to find out who killed their pet engagement strategy, the already slim chances of heading off the catastrophe of a nuclear Iran are evaporating.
Jonathan Tobin
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