Israel Matzav

Obama's 'yes we can' on Iran

David Ignatius gives an account of a meeting between a small group of reporters and President Obama in which the President invites Iran back to the 'negotiating table.'

His message was that even as U.N. sanctions squeeze Tehran, he is leaving open a "pathway" for a peaceful settlement of the nuclear issue.

"It is very important to put before the Iranians a clear set of steps that we would consider sufficient to show that they are not pursuing nuclear weapons," Obama said, adding: "They should know what they can say 'yes' to." As in the past, he left open the possibility that the United States would accept a deal that allows Iran to maintain its civilian nuclear program, so long as Iran provides "confidence-building measures" to verify that it is not building a bomb.

This is not the first time in recent days that we have indications that the Obama administration wants to go back to negotiating with Iran. Still, Danielle Pletka is stunned.

For anyone who has suggested that the administration’s mixed signals on Iran, confused messages to allies, equivocation on the shape of a deal with Iran, and other and sundry policy embarrassments are the result of poor staff work or incompetent management, the clear answer today is that the root of the confusion is the president of the United States. More than ever before, in this crude meeting with scribes, Obama reveals himself as a rigid ideologue, a modern-day Neville Chamberlain who cannot accept the failure of diplomacy. For Obama, the greatest danger is not a nuclear Iran; it is the failure of dialogue.

In the last year, I have heard hand-wringing from White House staff about the president’s implacable antipathy to Israel, and I wrote it off. I’ve heard that the vagaries of Iran policy came straight from the Oval Office, and I discounted the gossip. In one fell swoop, Ignatius lays bare the truth. Naïve, doctrinaire, frightening.

And exactly what some of us warned about during the 2008 election campaign.

Here's another account of the same meeting.

"Changing [Iran's] calculus is very difficult, even though this is painful for them, and we are beginning to see rumblings in Iran that they are surprised by how successful we've been," Obama said, according to Marc Ambinder. "That doesn't mean that they aren't working actively to get around it. But the costs of the sanctions are going to be higher than Iran would have anticipated six months ago, even three months ago."

"It may be that their ideological commitment to nuclear weapons is such that they're not making a simple cost-benefit analysis on this issue," Obama said. If that is the case, "then they will bear the costs of that," the president said.

And here is a third and very different take.

The main thrust of Obama’s message Wednesday was not of hope for a new diplomatic opening to Iran, Kagan says, but that the current strategy of pressure and sanctions is working.

“Some of the journalists present, upon hearing the president's … point about the door still being open to Iran, decided that he was signaling a brand-new diplomatic initiative,” Kagan writes at the Washington Post.

“They started peppering Obama with questions to ferret out exactly what ‘new’ diplomatic actions he was talking about and, after the president left, they continued probing the senior officials," he wrote.

“This put the officials in an awkward position: They didn't want to say flat out that the administration was not pursuing a new diplomatic initiative because this might suggest that the administration was not interested in diplomacy at all,” Kagan continued. “But they made perfectly clear -- in a half-dozen artful formulations -- that, no, there was no new diplomatic initiative in the offing.”

“I left feeling sympathy for this and every administration,” Kagan wrote. “The ‘news’ out of this briefing was that the administration wanted everyone to know how tough it was being on Iran.”

Others at the meeting, from whom we may yet hear, include Jackson Diehl of the Washington Post, Carol Giacomo of the New York Times editorial board, ABC’s Christiane Amanpour, NBC’s David Gregory, the Atlantic Monthly’s Jeffrey Goldberg, and the Economist's Peter David.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 8:56 AM