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Why Did Obama Want to Elevate Iran?
An article by reporter Lee Smith discusses the possibility that the Obama team went after Gen. Flynn because he was the man most able to undermine/expose the Iran deal. Reading the article in The Tablet, I kept scratching my head wondering why Obama worked so hard to elevate Iran at the expense of US interests and those of our ally Israel. Can someone explain to me, from Obama’s perspective, how the Iran deal was in the interest of the US?
Published in Foreign Policy
That Iranian are just as human as Americans.
And so are Indonesians.
These truisms shouldn’t be a problem.
I think it may have an effect. Maybe not a strong one, but who knows? I know that living abroad as a child had an effect on me, and that I retain an interest in and sympathy for the countries I lived in.
This is a really good discussion—thank you, everyone. I would suggest a both/and rather than either/or. Emotion absolutely comes into
Like Zafar (if to a lesser extent) I have some familiarity with the longer story of US/Iran relations, and thus am aware that Obama, like any U.S. president, came into office faced with a complicated situation for which there were no good or easy answers.
Trump did too. Indeed, whomever the next president is, and the one after that and probably the one after that will also have to deal with “The Middle East” …a complicated situation for which there shall be no good or easy answers.
The big mistakes seem to me primarily made by people who believe that they are capable of fixing it. Forget, for the moment, whether we (whoever “we” are—the Bush Administration, the Carter Administration, the Obama Administration) have the right to fix it, or even the ability to define “fix” and “it” in ways that those most directly involved would recognize. In my lifetime, every American president has attempted to fix the Middle East and every one has, as far as I can tell, has failed.
Where Zafar and I differ is that I think Trump may have the right attitude—at least, if I understand Trump’s attitude correctly. Or maybe what I’m just projecting. If I were president, I’d like to think I would declare honestly that we can’t fix the Middle East. And we aren ‘t going to try.
It’s difficult, because Americans are an optimistic crowd and a generally universalist one: since it is self-evident that All Men Are Created Equal and Endowed With Inalienable Rights, and because we are a bona fide multi-racial and multi-ethnic society rather than an agonizingly amateurish attempt at one (see “Sweden”) we tend to regard everyone on earth as potential Americans.
And so, anything but Islamophobic, George W. Bush honestly believed that the Muslim world was as desirous of, capable of and deserving of a liberal democracy as Americans are, and was willing to spill American blood to help them become kind of like America. Especially: Texas.
Oops.
Anything but Islamophobic, Obama believed that if Americans could knock off the blood spilling and instead be sufficiently respectful of even the most eccentric aspects of the Muslim world, if we would only apologize (w/reparations) humbly enough, bemoan and condemn all our prior efforts at improving things, stop supporting the only country in the Middle East that (ironically) most closely resembles America, and not demand that Muslims “reform” according to our suspect standards (racismsexismhomophobiacolonialism) the Middle East would become kind of like…America. Especially: Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Oops.
@grannydude – I don’t think the issue is the US trying to fix the Middle East. It’s the US wanting to control the Middle East.
America for a long time was good at looking past grievances, possibly because as a ‘new’ nation, our local grievances didn’t come with hundreds or even thousands of years of back story (though the identity politics crowd is trying hard to make generational retribution part of The Narrative). Trying to graft solutions onto the Middle East without taking into account past conflicts and grievances likely contributed to the Law of Unintended Consequences playing out, and playing out on both sides in the timeline of the past 15 years. It seems clear that while of the some leadership in the Middle East got that Obama wasn’t Bush, they took the attitude — or were advised by others — that Trump was and pushed back in counterproductive fashion, when the reality is he’s far less focused on either nation building or changing the paradigm of power balances in the region than probably any president since JFK, whose time was in-between the Shah’s arrival in Iran in 1953, 1956 Arab-Israeli conflict and the 1967 one, so the focus was more directly on the Cold War with the Soviets.
That’s why I was reluctant to comment. Lots of fans of the mullahs, I guess.
A fact is not an endorsement.
Politics has never been my game. It does appear to me that after the Reagan Administration the Democrat Party really began to operate under a, perhaps not unified, but surely a common shift leftward. This has included much antipathy toward what until that point had been a traditional view of the American way stemming from the founding principles. What has really made this effective is the coalescing of leftists of all stripes especially evident since Trump has been President. So Democrats, having assumed the very publicly acceptable label as ‘liberals’, now include all ideological positions favoring government control over the people, including Communists. This appears to have gotten organized with momentum during the Clinton Administration.
While this has been going on the Republican Party has been all over the place culminating in the election of Donald Trump, a candidate unacceptable to a large part of the Republican establishment. This has changed the Republican Party in some ways that may not be clear until after the 2020 election.
What I have just said is my own non-expert view of what I have seen while living my life as an ordinary American not really much involved in the political scene.
It might be that VJ’s influence favoring Iran, a process she had been building on since childhood, in the Obama White House grew and was more significant in dealing with Iran in the second term, all part of Obama’s posture favoring governing by a collective society, that he had been building on since childhood. The strongest example of the latter point is the Democrat positioning favoring Communist China. American progressives have joined all other forms of American collectivists, including Communists, to tear down the American way based on individual liberty.
I think that’s where we are this election year.
I don’t think that it’s either of these, at the root. The US would like to fix the Middle East, because this would solve a problem and be an enormous accomplishment for any President who could pull it off.
But the thing that we need most of all is stability in the Middle East, because of oil. Oil is essential to the world economy, and a large proportion of the most readily accessible oil in the world happens to be situated in the Middle East.
Other than oil, the Middle East is an irrelevant and relatively primitive backwater, and has been for around 2,300 years, since the time of Alexander. In its medieval peak, it largely extracted wealth from east-west trade, and it lost that monopoly when the Portuguese figured out how to sail around Africa, followed by the Dutch and then the British.
An early example of safe distancing.
Really, if it wasn’t for the mess Hugo Chavez and Nicholas Maduro have made of Venezuela, we could disengage from the Middle East even more. But the U.S. does not produce very much high-sulfur content ‘heavy’ oil from its fields, and virtually none from the shale oil areas opened up by fracking and horizontal drilling — if anything, that oil can be too light at times, which makes it less useful for certain types of refining. Venezuela used to be the big provider of high-sulfur oil, but thanks to the wonderful efficiencies of socialist leadership, they can’t even meet their own internal needs, led alone export, which leaves U.S. refineries that are tooled to handle heavy oil in need of other sources, including oil from Saudi Arabia.
This—and @Jon1979 ‘s comment as well—are what I mean by “it’s not either/or.”
It is possible for a country to simultaneously hope to gain control over another country/region, and to “fix” or improve it for the benefit of its native inhabitants. Take the usual example—Germany in WW2.
Germany wanted to control Poland. It had no interest in the well-being of native Poles, who were untermenschen and therefore destined to serve as slaves.
Germany wanted to both control and fix Denmark—that is, the Germans actually believed that Danes would be better off if they embraced both the concept of “Ayran” superiority and National Socialism, and dwelled happily under the aegis of the Third Reich.
After the war, the US sought to (temporarily) control and (permanently) fix Germany and Japan. Arguably, we did a pretty good job with them (though of course, it ain’t over yet, IMHO) which is part of the reason we have more confidence than we probably should that we can do it again.
As a rule, America’s own myth about itself (with “myth” here defined in the scholarly sense, as a story, true or false, meant to guide and inspire the hearer) makes Americans disinterested in the seizure of control over another country unless it is for that country’s own good, or perhaps for the world’s good (e.g. Vietnam, Iraq, Somalia, WW1…) The protesters back in Dubyah’s day claimed it was “all about oil,” but even if one believes that about Bush and his administration, the fact remains that the war had to be pitched to Americans as a.) pre-emptive self-defense and b.) improving the miserable lot of Iraqis.
I guess, hence the endless peace processes.
But we are in that chair, Blanche, we are in that chair
The West needs enough stability in the Middle East to ensure the flow of oil to markets.
Representative Government contributes mightily to political stability and stable states in the long run. (Short and medium term less certain.)
But representative Governments reflect the will and opinion of the people. In the Middle East [edit: and Venezuela] this may not align with the West’s dominant agenda.
It’s a conundrum.
It’s possible but infrequent.
Post WWII Germany and Japan are exceptions, they are far from the rule.
I think it’s common, at least in retrospect. There’s a tendency in most countries to cast their actions overseas in this light if they can, and to occlude the negative results or their own self interest.
Spain and Portugal were taking Christ to the Indians in South America, Britan was busy giving the subcontinent railways and abolishing sati, France was on a civilising mission spreading the language of Voltaire and also excellent baked goods, the Soviet Union was liberating peasants from oppression in Central Asia, the Caliphs were spreading the faith, etc. etc. etc.
All of these claims are true, of course, but a tiny portion of the truth too often aggrandised as the whole. That’s how the most effective dissimulation works, after all.
Don’t you think this dissonance between self-perceptions and real life actions makes it harder to achieve success in an endeavour than it otherwise would be?
As I understand Shia Islam, the Islamic Republic’s problem with the House of Saud isn’t that they are hereditary monarchs, it’s that they aren’t the right hereditary monarchs.
Yeah, I know that it’s vaguer in broader Shia tradition (the Caliph has to be a descendent of Mohammad, unclear how he is selected) but the Islamic Republic is more specific. It’s only from wiki but I found more or less what I remembered (emphasis added):
I think there’s also a difference between ‘King’ and ‘Caliph’ , which was convenient for a movement that wanted to overthrow the Shah.
I think of the Clinton, Bush II and Obama administrations like this:
Clinton: Primarily corrupt and secondarily ideological
Bush: Tolerant of corruption, tolerant of Clinton ideologues in federal agencies
Obama: Primarly ideological; hostile to US sovereignty, highly corrupt, and the corruption is to enrich his ideological allies while promoting a transnational progressive agenda. George Soros is a paradigm for this.
Flynn opposed Obama’s plans for Iran, (had Flynn prevailed, the change would have interfered with a lot of plans for getting rich.) Flynn’s plan to clean the Augean stables of the US intelligence community would have stepped on a lot of toes around the world; toes that love the very expensive footwear that covers them.
The he allied himself with Trump.
Why DC hates Trump:
Absolutely!
And it was a success. We always tend to remember our successes.
That was certainly what happened in Europe after WWII.
But also, the visible form of imperium is not static but changes. From this article on that:
I’m not completely convinced, but I think there’s some truth to it.
Thanks.