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| The Iranian supreme leaser, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei delivers a speech during a ceremony commemorating the 26th anniversary of the death of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini |
Los AngelesTimes
Obama says Iranian leaders' anti-Semitism doesn't preclude a
desire for survival. History shows he's wrong
The fact that you are anti-Semitic, or
racist, doesn't preclude you from being interested in survival,” President
Obama said last month in an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg in the Atlantic.
“The fact that the supreme leader is anti-Semitic doesn't mean that this
overrides all of his other considerations.”
The question of whether Iran, run by Supreme
Leader Ali Khamenei and his ayatollahs, is a rational state goes to the very
heart of the debate over its nuclear program and the negotiations, now nearing
a June 30 deadline, to curb it.
Simply put: Those in the “rational” camp see a
regime that wants to remain in power and achieve regional hegemony and will therefore
cooperate, rather than languish under international sanctions that threaten to
deny it both. The other side cannot accept that religious fanatics who deny the
Holocaust, blame all evil on the Jews and pledge to annihilate the 6 million of
them in Israel can be trusted with a nuclear program capable of producing the
world's most destructive weapon in a single year.
The rational/irrational dispute was
ever-present in the intimate discussions between the United States and Israel
on the Iranian nuclear issue during my term as Israel's ambassador to
Washington, from 2009 to the end of 2013. I took part in those talks and was
impressed by their candor. Experts assessed the progress in Iran's program: the
growing number of centrifuges in its expanding underground facilities, the
rising stockpile of enriched uranium that could be used in not one but several
bombs, and the time that would be required for Iran to “break out” or “sneak
out” from international inspectors and become a nuclear power.
Both nations' technical estimates on Iran
largely dovetailed. Where the two sides differed was over the nature of the
Islamic Republic. The Americans tended to see Iranian leaders as logical actors
who understood that the world would never allow them to attain nuclear weapons
and would penalize them mercilessly — even militarily — for any attempt to try.
By contrast, most Israelis viewed the ayatollahs
as radical jihadists who claimed they took instructions from the Shiite “Hidden
Imam,” tortured homosexuals and executed women accused of adultery, and strove
to commit genocide against Jews. Israelis could not rule out the possibility
that the Iranians would be willing to sacrifice half of their people as martyrs
in a war intended to “wipe Israel off the map.”
As famed Middle East scholar Bernard Lewis once
observed, “Mutually assured destruction” for the Iranian regime “is not a
deterrent — it's an inducement.”
The gap between the American and Israeli
assessment of Iranian sanity only widened over the years. Obama insisted that
the ayatollahs analyzed the nuclear issue on a cost-benefit basis. “They have
their worldview and they see their interests. They're not North Korea,” he told
Goldberg in a December interview.
Yet Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu saw
Tehran's rulers as medieval fanatics determined to exterminate the Jews and
achieve world domination. “You don't want a messianic apocalyptic cult
controlling atomic bombs,” he warned Goldberg in a separate Atlantic interview
in March. A nuclear-armed Iran, Netanyahu has frequently declared, is far worse
than North Korea.
Which of them is right? Here's the problem with
Obama's point of view: If indeed they are rational, Iranian leaders have had
every reason to conclude that the president desperately wants a nuclear deal,
and that their long-term cooperation is not really necessary.
Although the White House has repeatedly claimed
that “the window for diplomacy will not remain open forever,” in fact it has
never come close to shutting. Even now, without a deal in place, it seems
obvious that the sanctions will start to unravel.
Consequently, the ayatollahs sensibly have
determined that, by dragging out the negotiations, they can wrest further
concessions from the United States. They can keep more centrifuges, more
facilities and a larger uranium stockpile.
Why, logically, would Iran believe Obama's
claim that “all options were on the table”? On the contrary, Iran has remained
the world's leading state sponsor of terrorism — brazenly threatening America's
allies in the Middle East, and in 2011 even allegedly planning a major
terrorist attack in Washington against the Saudi ambassador — without facing
military or even diplomatic retribution from the United States.
The Iranians have taken note of how the White
House helped overthrow Libya's Moammar Kadafi after he gave up his nuclear
program but shied away from North Korea when it tested more weapons. Iran can
see how Syrian dictator Bashar Assad, by ceding part of his chemical arsenal,
went from being America's problem to America's solution, and then to
barrel-bombing his countrymen with impunity. Iranian rulers understood they
could count on obtaining their nuclear program's objectives of regime survival
and regional supremacy without dismantling a centrifuge.
Obama's argument not only fails logic's test
but also history's. Anti-Semitism, the president further explained to Goldberg
in May, “doesn't preclude you from being rational about the need to keep your
economy afloat [or] being strategic about how you stay in power.” Except, in
one infamous example, it did. The Nazis pursued insane ends. Even during the
last days of World War II, as the Allied armies liberated Europe, they diverted
precious military resources to massacring Jews.
Obama would never say that anti-black racists
are rational. And he would certainly not trust them with the means — however
monitored — to reach their racist goals. That was the message Israeli officials
and I conveyed in our discreet talks with the administration. The response was
not, to our mind, reasonable.
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Has Michael Oren been reading this blog? :)
