Elsewhere today in the PJM Empire, Michael Ledeen asks “why Obama wants a deal with Iran.” Here’s more:
Obama entered the White House with the intention of forging an alliance with our most dangerous enemy in the Middle East. That fact has to be the baseline of any serious analysis of our government’s policies.
Which takes us straightaway to the great unanswered question: Why does the president want this alliance?
I don’t know the answer. I suspect there is no single answer, but many components. No doubt one component is Obama’s well-documented conviction that American misbehavior is responsible for many, if not most, of the world’s problems. He probably believes the myths about the 1953 events that restored the shah to power in Tehran. He may well share at least some elements of the Iranian regime’s hatred of past American actions.
But those fairly widespread, basically secular, and quintessentially leftist convictions don’t get us there. They don’t begin to explain the president’s passion to embrace the Islamic Republic, the world’s biggest killer of Americans, a regime that slaughters and imprisons and tortures its own citizens in record numbers, especially in light of its consistently anti-American behavior throughout the Obama years.
The glib answer — my specialty, I know — is that Obama sees Iran’s actions as features, not bugs. A more generous take is the possibility that Obama sees the same dysfunction in the Arab world that we see, and has concluded that the best thing for our security would be a Persian hegemony over the Arab lands. Somewhere in between lies the theory that Valerie Jarrett is as smitten with Iran (where she grew up) as she is smitten with Barack Obama — and of course he has long been dependent on her as one of his few (now perhaps only) trusted advisors.
Make no mistake however. Obama’s cause might be either pro- or anti-American. It might be either accidental or by design. But American foreign policy these last six years has been, to paraphrase Orwell, objectively pro-Mullah.
For a full history of this inescapable conclusion, please add Michael Doran’s “Obama’s Secret Iran Strategy” to today’s reading list.
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