In Victor Davis Hanson’s tour de force on Obama’s demagogic Iran Deal defense (“defense” in the sense of the best defense is to be as offensive as possible), he explains the sense of “urgency” that drove “both Iran and Obama”:
The former was fearful that it would be both poorer and weaker when a possibly very different president takes office in 2017; the latter in desperation was looking for a legacy after the detritus of reset, Libya, ISIS, Syria, and the growing estrangement from long-term allies such as Egypt and Israel.
Victor devotes part of his column to exploring the economic pressures the mullahs faced: the “collapse of oil prices, which assuaged our Asian and European allies’ worries about skyrocketing oil prices should Iranian oil go off the market.”
More evidence has now emerged about the desperation of Obama’s legacy chase that Victor alludes to and how it, too, incentivized the jihadist regime to come to the table. As my column this morning details, far from deft diplomacy, the desperation appears to have manifested itself in a sell-out of American positions.
Relying on an essential new MEMRI report that quotes top Iranian officials on how the deal came about, my column brings two issues to the fore:
(1) Obama secretly pleaded with Iran’s “supreme leader” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to cut a deal back in 2011, when the undeniably “hardliner” government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was in power. This puts the lie to Obama’s pretense that he exploited an opportunity presented in summer 2013, when the purportedly “pragmatic” “moderate” new President Hassan Rouhani took office (an absurd claim to begin with since Rouhani is not a moderate and hardliner Khamenei runs the show in Iran regardless of whom he permits to sit in the president’s chair). As Victor recounts, Obama claimed in last week’s speech that the Iran deal had come about “after two years of negotiations.” But according to statements by Khamenei and other Iranian officials, Obama reached out to Khamenei in 2011 through an intermediary (the Sultan of Oman) with a message Iran’s leader interpreted as meaning the United States was prepared to lift sanctions promptly and recognize Iran as a nuclear power.
(2) To provide additional enticement to the Iranians, the administration signaled that it was prepared to fold on a major and longstanding American priority: Denial that the Nuclear Non-proliferation treaty endowed Iran with a right to enrich uranium. For communicating this concession – which cut against Obama’s public campaign promises to stop Iran’s enrichment of uranium – Obama turned to a key Capitol Hill ally, then-Senator and Foreign Relations chairman (now Secretary of State) John Kerry. According to the Iranians, Kerry – also using Oman as an intermediary – relayed a letter to the regime in Tehran, stating that the U.S. recognized “Iran’s rights regarding the enrichment cycle.”
Regarding issue (2), I’ll have more shortly on Obama’s choice of Kerry as his point man.