President Barack Obama has extended his new outreach to Iran’s mullahs by dropping his usual criticism of Iran’s theocracy, and offered no penalties for Iran’s development of nuclear weapons.
“The United States and Iran have been isolated from one another since the Islamic Revolution of 1979,” Obama declared in his Tuesday speech to the U.N. General Assembly.
“But I do believe that if we can resolve the issue of Iran’s nuclear program, that can serve as a major step down a long road towards a different relationship, one based on mutual interests and mutual respect,” he declared, while downplaying the long-standing ideological conflict between Americans’ freedoms and Islamic strictures.
His deputies also said Obama would like to meet briefly with Iran’s new president, who was recently nominated to the position by the top layer of Iran’s theocratic government, the Guardian Council. The president, Hasan Rouhani, recently boasted that he used diplomatic talks to stymie U.S. and European effort to stop Iran’s nuclear weapons program.
“The tone was, ‘Can’t we all get along,'” said Jeremy Rabkin, a law professor at George Mason University.
Obama failed to detail the terms of a nuclear deal with Iran, didn’t set a deadline and didn’t demonstrate as much urgency as he shows about the Syrian government use of chemical weapons,” which are much less deadly than nukes, Rabkin said.
Instead, much of the speech was an attempt to show Arabs and Iranians that Americans mean well, despite the deep ideological disagreements between Western and Islamic governments, he said.
“The thing that a lot of people are worried about is that he will transition from a [unenforceable] phony deal with [Syrian dictator Bashar] Assad to a phony deal with the Iranians,” said Rabkin.
Obama “is backpedaling on the staunch language he used in the past,” said Noah Pollak, executive director of the Emergency Committee for Israel.
“What’s problematic is it implies that the Iranian nuclear weapons [development] program is not unacceptable — only possessing a nuclear weapon is unacceptable,” Pollak said.
That problem was highlighted in the 2012 election, when GOP candidate Mitt Romney said he opposed an Iranian nuclear program, but Obama insisted he opposed Iranian nuclear weapons, Pollak said.
Overall, Pollack said, “I think Obama would like to kick the can down the road until he’s not president any more.”
Obama’s tone and appeal this year were much different from his 2011 and 2012 speeches, when he denounced Iran’s theocracy.
“In Iran, we’ve seen a government that refuses to recognize the rights of its own people,” he declared in 2011.
“The Iranian government cannot demonstrate that its [nuclear] program is peaceful. It has not met its obligations and it rejects offers that would provide it with peaceful nuclear power,” he said.
The language was repeated in 2012.
“In Iran, we see where the path of a violent and unaccountable ideology leads … just as it restricts the rights of its own people, the Iranian government props up a dictator in Damascus and supports terrorist groups abroad,” he said. “Time and again, it has failed to take the opportunity to demonstrate that its nuclear program is peaceful, and to meet its obligations to the United Nations,” he announced.
But the 2013 speech dropped the passages about democracy and rights. “We are not seeking regime change and we respect the right of the Iranian people to access peaceful nuclear energy,” he said Tuesday.
“We are determined to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon,” he said.
Obama’s new outreach to Iran comes as his Middle East policy continues to crater.
He’s been pushing to make Israel sign a peace deal with Arab countries, even before those countries formally agree that Israel has a right to exist. The Arab dictatorships alongside Israel, in Gaza, Ramallah, southern Lebanon and Syria, continue to laud attacks on Israel, whose democratic government has declined to surrender territory to its enemies.
The Libyan government that was created in 2011 with Obama’s deployment of the U.S. Air Force, can’t govern its major cities, such as Benghazi, when the U.S. ambassador was killed by a jihadis attack in 2012.
Syria’s civil war has become more sectarian and bloody, allowing an al-Qaida affiliate to establish a large sanctuary for itself in Northern Syria. Obama’s efforts to aid the rebels have been stymied by opposition in Congress and by clever Russian diplomacy.
Egypt’s military has overthrown and now banned the Muslim Brotherhood, four years after Obama insisted that Brotherhood members be invited to hear his landmark 2009 speech in Cairo.
Obama acknowledged the failures.
Libya’s “government [is] struggling to provide security; armed groups, in some places extremists, [are] ruling parts of a fractured land. … But does anyone truly believe that the situation in Libya would be better if [former dictator Moammar] Qaddafi had been allowed to kill, imprison or brutalize his people into submission?” he told the audience of his 2013 speech.
In Egypt, the new military government “responded to the desires of millions of Egyptians who believed the [Muslim Brotherhood] revolution had taken a wrong turn, but it, too, has made decisions inconsistent with inclusive democracy — through an emergency law, and restrictions on the press and civil society and opposition parties,” he complained.
“The United States will maintain a constructive relationship with the interim [military] government that promotes core interests like the Camp David Accords and counterterrorism. … But we have not proceeded with the delivery of certain military systems, and our support will depend upon Egypt’s progress in pursuing a more democratic path,” he said.
“The crisis in Syria, and the destabilization of the region, goes to the heart of broader challenges that the international community must now confront,” he said. “How should we respond to conflicts in the Middle East and North Africa — conflicts between countries, but also conflicts within them?”