President Obama has worked hard to enact punishing economic sanctions against Iran, and to assemble a coalition of nations willing to do the same.
President Obama is right when he says, as he did this week, with Israel Prime Minster Benjamin Netanyahu in Washington:
“This is not just an issue of Israeli interests, this is an issue of US interests. It’s also not just an issue of consequences for Israel if action is taken prematurely. There are consequences to the US as well.”
The President is also right when he says, as he did this week:
“It is my belief that we have a window of opportunity where this can still be resolved diplomatically. That’s not just my view — that’s the view of our top intelligence officials, it’s the view of top Israeli intelligence officials.”
The President is also right when he says: “The argument that we’ve made to the Israelis is that we have made an unprecedented commitment to their security. There is an unbreakable bond between our two countries, but one of the functions of friends is to make sure that we provide honest and unvarnished advice in terms of what is the best approach to achieve a common goal, particularly one in which we have a stake.”
Aye, there’s the rub: “honest and unvarnished advice” between friends. Here we reach Obama’s credibility problem on Iran. The Israelis have been providing honest and unvarnished advice to Obama on Iran since he took office. But during his first two years in office, Obama was not listening.
On Iran Obama is right — but two years too late being right.
Obama complains, rightly, that the Iran question should not be a matter of presidential politics. Yet, it is strictly Obama’s two-year hiatus in confronting Iran that has landed his efforts right smack in the middle of the presidential campaign.
In 2008, Obama campaigned on a platform of “engaging” Iran, and spent his first two years in office trying to do so. This was naive. This was fruitless. This was wrong. Either Obama was too stubborn to see that Iran, having violated UN resolutions repeatedly, was totally beyond good-faith negotiations on nuclear weapons; or he was too egotistical in thinking that he alone would succeed in “engaging” Iran when every other Western head of state, and the UN, had failed.
Obama’s two-year delay in confronting Iran also delayed his realization that Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons had consequences for the US. After all, since the day Obama took office (and before), Israel has been pleading for the US to recognize that Iran is not just Israel’s problem. For two years, Obama’s dreams of a new, peaceful Iran prevented him from hearing that.
Yes, there may still be a window of opportunity for diplomacy, but that window — due to Obama’s two-year delay —is almost shut. Obama has only himself to blame for that, since the longstanding, honest and unvarnished advice of Israel has been to acknowledge Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons above any other Iranian national interest.
Obama is right that he has made an unprecedented commitment to Israel’s national security. For this he deserves great appreciation. Still, due to his unwise, pivotal and repercussive delay in confronting Iran, his credibility on Iran is in doubt.
Copyright © 2012 by the Intermountain Jewish News
