Israel Matzav

Barack Obama's seven failures on Iran

In an article that's in Monday's JPost, Barry Rubin lists seven ways in which Barack Obama has failed on Iran.

First, the administration set a September deadline for instituting increased sanctions and then, instead of following a two-track strategy of engagement alongside pressure, postponed doing anything while in talks with Iran.

Second, it refused to take advantage of the regime's international unpopularity and growing opposition demonstrations due to the alleged rigged June election for the presidency. On the contrary, it assured the Iranian regime it would not do so.

Third, the administration set a December deadline should engagement fail, then refused to recognize it had failed and did nothing. It is the failure even to try to meet this time limit by implementing some credible action that has crossed the line, triggered the point of no return.

Fourth, the US government kept pretending that it was somehow convincing the Chinese and Russians to participate, while there was never any chance of this happening. Indeed, this was clear from statements repeatedly made by leaders of both countries. Now, this duo has sabotaged the process without any cost inflicted by the US while making clear they will continue doing so.

Fifth, high-ranking US officials still speak of their continued eagerness to engage Iran and mention at least six months more of discussion efforts before anything is done about sanctions.

Sixth, the administration now defines sanctions as overwhelmingly focused on the Revolutionary Guards, who it cannot hurt economically, thus signaling to the Iranian regime that it will do nothing effective to hurt the country's economy. This means that even if and when sanctions are increased, they will be toothless.

All of these steps tell Iran's regime: full speed ahead on building nuclear weapons; repress your opponents brutally and the US will do nothing.

After these six failures, the US is now - in effect - resting. And that is the seventh failure. There are no signs that anything is changing in Washington.

Read the whole thing.

Barry has an underlying assumption that Obama did not want Iran to obtain nuclear weapons. I'm not sure that assumption is correct. Suffice it to say that if the administration had set out to ensure that Iran would become a nuclear power and have nuclear weapons with which to threaten Israel and other countries, I'm not sure they would have needed to do anything differently.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 9:44 PM