Give
President Obama credit. His Iran nuclear deal may be disastrous but the
packaging was brilliant. The near-simultaneous prisoner exchange was meant to
distract from last Saturday’s official implementation of
the sanctions-lifting deal. And it did. The Republicans concentrated almost
all their fire on the swap sideshow.
And in denouncing the
swap, they were wrong. True, we should have made the prisoner release a
precondition for negotiations. But that preemptive concession was made long ago
(among many others, such as granting Iran in
advance the
right to enrich uranium). The remaining question was getting our prisoners
released before we gave away all our leverage upon implementation of the
nuclear accord. We did.
Republicans
say: We shouldn’t negotiate with terror states. But we do and we should. How
else do you get hostages back? And yes, of course negotiating encourages
further hostage taking. But there is always something to be gained by
kidnapping Americans. This swap does not affect that truth one way or the
other.
And here, we didn’t
give away much. The seven released Iranians, none of whom has blood on his
hands, were sanctions busters (and
a hacker), and sanctions are essentially over now. The slate is clean.
But how unfair, say
the critics. We released prisoners duly convicted in a court of law. Iran
released perfectly innocent, unjustly jailed hostages.
Yes,
and so what? That’s just another way of saying we have the rule of law, they
don’t. It doesn’t mean we abandon our hostages. Natan Sharansky was a prisoner
of conscience who spent eight years in the gulag on totally phony charges. He
was exchanged for two real Soviet spies. Does anyone think we should have said
no?
The one valid
criticism of the Iranian swap is that we left one, perhaps two, Americans behind and
unaccounted for. True. But the swap itself was perfectly reasonable. And
cleverly used by the administration to create a heartwarming human interest
story to overshadow a rotten diplomatic deal, just as the Alan Gross release sweetened
a Cuba deal that gave the store away to the Castro brothers.
The
real story of Saturday, Jan. 16, 2016 — “Implementation Day” of the Iran deal — was
that it marked a historic inflection point in the geopolitics of the Middle
East. In a stroke, Iran shed almost four decades of rogue-state status and was
declared a citizen of good standing of the international community, open to
trade, investment and diplomacy. This, without giving up, or even promising to
change, its policy of subversion and aggression. This, without having forfeited
its status as the world’s greatest purveyor of terrorism.
Overnight, it went
not just from pariah to player but from pariah to dominant regional power,
flush with $100 billion in unfrozen assets and
virtually free of international sanctions. The oil trade alone will pump tens
of billions of dollars into its economy. The day after Implementation Day,
President Hassan Rouhani predicted 5 percent growth —
versus the contracting, indeed hemorrhaging, economy in pre-negotiation 2012
and 2013.
On Saturday, the
Iranian transport minister announced the purchase of
114 Airbuses from Europe. This inaugurates a rush of deals binding
European companies to Iran, thoroughly undermining Obama’s pipe dream of
“snapback sanctions” if Iran cheats.
Cash-rich,
reconnected with global banking and commerce, and facing an Arab world
collapsed into a miasma of raging civil wars, Iran has instantly become the
dominant power of the Middle East. Not to worry, argued the administration. The
nuclear opening will temper Iranian adventurism and empower Iranian moderates.
The opposite is
happening. And it’s not just the ostentatious, illegal ballistic missile
launches; not just Iran’s president reacting to the most puny retaliatory
sanctions by ordering his military to accelerate the missile program; not just
the videotaped and broadcast humiliation of seized U.S. sailors.
Look at what the
mullahs are doing at home. Within hours of “implementation,” the regime disqualified 2,967
of roughly 3,000 moderate candidates from even running in parliamentary
elections next month. And just to make sure we got the point, the supreme
leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, reiterated that Iranian policy — aggressively
interventionist and immutably anti-American — continues unchanged.
In 1938, the morning
after Munich, Europe woke up to Germany as the continent’s dominant power. Last
Sunday, the Middle East woke up to Iran as the regional hegemon, with a hand —
often predominant — in the future of Syria, Yemen, Iraq, the Gulf Arab states
and, in time, in the very survival of Israel.
And
we’re arguing over an asymmetric hostage swap.
