Obama goes over the top in bashing Ahmadinejad
By Juan Cole
Sep. 24, 2008 | Sen. Barack Obama responded with outrage to the remarks made Tuesday by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad before the United Nations General Assembly, expressing regret that the quirky little president was even allowed to speak. Obama’s denunciation was mild compared with that of Gov. Sarah Palin, who accused Ahmadinejad of dreaming “of being an agent in a ‘Final Solution’ — the elimination of the Jewish people.” In contrast, “Larry King Live” carried an hourlong interview with Ahmadinejad in which the Iranian was allowed to speak for himself and repeatedly denied any violent intentions. King thus reinforced the trend whereby entertainment television, whether Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show” or King’s own dog-and-pony interview hour, conveys reality-based news while politicians continue to paint inaccurate and even fantastic scenarios that are harmful to U.S. foreign policy.
In his speech, Ahmadinejad said “the American empire … is reaching the end of the road” and accused the U.N. Security Council of allowing “Zionist murders” because of “pressure from a few bullying powers.” Obama issued a statement saying, “I strongly condemn President Ahmadinejad’s outrageous remarks at the United Nations, and am disappointed that he had a platform to air his hateful and anti-Semitic views.” He added, “The threat from Iran’s nuclear program is grave.” Obama then called on his rival in the presidential race, Sen. John McCain, “to join me in supporting a bipartisan bill to increase pressure on the Iranian regime by allowing states and private companies to divest from companies doing business in Iran.” He slammed McCain, saying that the senator was playing partisan politics by declining to join Obama in this divestment campaign.
In the heat of the campaign, Obama surely overreached himself in appearing to advocate barring leaders of member states from addressing the United Nations because their views are obnoxious to Americans. He also fell into the trap of declining to make a distinction between anti-Zionist views and anti-Semitic ones. If a policy of exclusion had been adopted by past administrations, Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev could not have announced from that podium the reduction of Red Army forces in Eastern Europe in 1988. And if anti-American statements should trigger the denial of a visa to come to New York, should Nelson Mandela, who called the United States the “most dangerous country in the world,” be excluded, too?
Obama’s assertion that Iran’s civilian nuclear energy research program constitutes a “grave threat” may or may not be true. The 2005 National Intelligence Estimate put Iran at least a decade away from having a nuclear weapon if it was trying hard to get one and if the international environment was conducive (i.e., if Iran could import all the equipment it needed easily). Neither of those conditions actually appears to exist, so Iran is very far away from having a bomb. The 2007 National Intelligence Estimate on Iran, parts of which were released last December, concluded that Iranian scientists have not done any weapons-related research since early 2003.
As Ahmadinejad pointed out to Larry King, no country has been as intensely inspected by the International Atomic Energy Agency as Iran. No regularly inspected country has ever developed a nuclear bomb. Although the IAEA’s Mohamed ElBaradei has expressed frustration that Iran failed to declare its nuclear research program before 2003, he continues to say that in current inspections, “the Agency has been able to continue to verify the non-diversion of declared nuclear material in Iran” to weapons purposes. This consistent IAEA finding through recent years raises the question of whether Obama is right to be so categorical on this issue.
As for the imposition of economic sanctions on Iran, it might be worth considering for a moment whether the U.S., with its faltering economy, is even able to cause a major oil exporter such as Iran much harm through a unilateral boycott. The law passed by Congress at the insistence of the Israel lobby, placing sanctions on firms doing business in Iran, does not punish those who merely distribute or import Iranian petroleum. Does Obama want to go even further with sanctions? If Congress really could close down Iran’s production of 4 million barrels a day, it would cause the price of petroleum to soar and throw the U.S. into a deep recession or depression. From the point of view of a reality-based foreign policy, this sort of step is known as “cutting off your nose to spite your face.” Russia and China are now balking at placing any further sanctions on Iran via the United Nations Security Council. (Russia is not exactly in a cooperative mood after the drubbing it took from U.S. politicians over its intervention to protect South Ossetia from Georgia.)
The sanctions have in any case had no effect on Iranian policy, though they are keeping Iran’s gas fields from being developed by American and European firms, a task that may fall to Russia’s Gazprom or its Chinese counterpart instead. (One would not advise a President Obama to threaten to cut off economic cooperation with China over its Iran investments, given how much U.S. debt Beijing holds.) Since natural gas is a global market, this boycott of Iran harms American consumers twice, causing the price of gas to be higher than necessary and making sure that the development of Iranian gas creates no jobs for Americans and brings no profits into this country.
If Obama’s reaction to Ahmadinejad was a bit breathless and probably counterproductive to U.S. interests, Gov. Palin’s was, typically, like something from outer space. In a speech the Republican vice-presidential nominee had planned to give at an anti-Ahmadinejad rally on Monday, organized by right-wing Zionist organizations before they decided not to have major politicians speak, she alleged that the Iranian president “dreams of being an agent in a ‘Final Solution’ — the elimination of the Jewish people. He has called Israel a ‘stinking corpse’ that is ‘on its way to annihilation.’ She warned apocalyptically that Iran had tested missiles capable of reaching Tel Aviv and that “the Iranian nuclear program is nearing completion.”
But is the Iranian president genocidal? Ahmadinejad explained on “Larry King Live” (you’d think at least Palin would watch that even if she does not, like, read books and newspapers) that there are some 20,000 Jews in Iran, who have a representative in Parliament. That representative, Maurice Motemad, and leaders of the Iranian Jewish community, have repeatedly protested to Ahmadinejad over his minimizing the extent of the Holocaust. Ahmadinejad told King, “We don’t have a problem with the Jewish people” (ma ba mardom-e yahud moshkeli nadarim). If Ahmadinejad wanted to launch a second Holocaust, would he not begin at home? It is tiresome to keep having to repeat it, but, moreover, Ahmadinejad does not have the power to launch any massacres, since the presidency in Iran is a weak position similar to that of our secretary of the interior. The commander in chief of the armed forces is Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has pledged an Iranian policy of no first strike against any country.
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