Israel Matzav

Obama getting on the job experience

This is from a New York Times article on how the Obama administration is learning the 'limits' of 'engagement.'

White House officials maintain that they have not abandoned Mr. Obama’s pledge of engagement, and point to the numerous times in the past year that he reached out to Iran, including a YouTube video to the Iranian people; a letter from Mr. Obama to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei; and even an offer to help Iran buy isotopes for a medical research reactor.

But the nonencounter in Munich between General Jones and Mr. Mottaki, like the full court press on Iran by Mrs. Clinton and other envoys to the region this week, shows that the administration is coming to terms with the limits of its engagement policy, many foreign policy experts say.

Ray Takeyh, a former Iran adviser to the Obama administration, said administration officials were learning from experience.

“There was a thesis a year ago that the differences between the United States and Iran was subject to diplomatic mediation, that they could find areas of common experience, that we were ready to have a dialogue with each other,” Mr. Takeyh said, but “those anticipations discounted the extent how the Iranian theocracy views engagement with the United States as a threat to its ideological identity.”

And if Mrs. Clinton is correct that the Revolutionary Guards, not the politicians or the clerics, are becoming the central power in Iran, the prospects for rapprochement can only look worse.

I could have told them that in 2008 and so could an awful lot of other people.

Hopefully, the next time, the United States will elect a President with experience in running something and not someone who has to learn on the job. Or at least someone who will listen to reason and not be so bone-headedly ideological.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 11:04 AM