Yesterday President Obama answered critical question after critical question about the Iran deal and repeatedly addressed Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and even the Israel lobby working in Congress:
My hope is, is that everyone in Congress also evaluates this agreement based on the facts — not on politics, not on posturing… not based on lobbying, but based on what’s in the national interest of the United States of America.”
Obama promised the press that the deal is only about nuclear weapons, and Iran will continue to be frozen out, a rogue state.
But compare that to the British discussion of the deal, and it’s night and day. The Conservative British government regards the deal as a great opening to the Iranians, to include them in the world and make them a good neighbor.
“It’s opening that country up with investment, trade and travel,” Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond said in discussion with Parliament on CSpan last night.
Britain wants to open an embassy in Iran by the end of the year, he said, and Brits have to start traveling to Iran and having the person-to-person interactions that will bring Iran back into the world. Iranian students have to be welcome in the west, so we will get to know one another. He expects Iran to play a leverage role over Hamas and Islamic militias in the Levant area.
“Iran is a major player in the region. It can if it chooses play an enormously positive role in the region,” Hammond said.
When a member of Parliament said that the deal would “bring the people of this remarkable nation back into the community of nations,” Hammond agreed.
“There is a huge opportunity to be grasped. It is in our interest and the world’s interest to grasp it.”
The deal gives the west a ten-year window, Hammond said, to change the “Iranian mindset,” and convince that country that the best future is one of cooperation with the west.
Hammond got a few skeptical responses from the MPs but generally they were celebratory. “Clearly this is a diplomatic triumph,” Nicholas Soames, a Conservative said. While Gerald Kaufman, the Labor MP from Manchester (and a Jewish critic of Israel), hailed it as the greatest achievement of Barack Obama’s presidency, a demonstration of the Churchill principle that Jaw Jaw is better than War War; and he called on Hammond to make sure that Israel doesn’t try and interfere in the deal. How many American politicians are hailing this as the greatest achievement of the Obama presidency and bewailing Israel influence? Only Obama himself, and only implicitly.
Hammond is in Israel now. He is going to try and convince Netanyahu that he cannot stop the deal in the US Congress. He was confrontational with Israel in his parliamentary remarks. “Israel doesn’t want any deal with Iran. Israel wants a permanent state of stand-off and I don’t believe that’s in the interest of the region, I don’t believe it’s in our interest,” Hammond said (per the Independent).
This is the same body, the British parliament, that led Obama and US public opinion when he refused to attack Syria two years ago. Maybe we should listen to them now. American politicians have to start hailing this deal as a way of getting Iran back into the community of nations.
This is a demonstration of the power of the Israel lobby. A deal with Iran is surely in American interests as much as it is in the Brits’ and western Europe’s. World powers want to settle down a turbulent region. But Israel doesn’t see it that way; it wants a permanent cold war with Iran so it can do anything it wants. And the Israel lobby is based on the premise that Israel must cultivate connections and influence with the superpower, in order to effect policy there. That’s what we’re seeing, with the remarkable degree of influence Netanyahu has in Washington.
Presidential historians often argue that most presidents can be placed in two camps: those who are historical and those who are caretakers. You can be successful president as a caretaker, like Clinton was, but it doesn’t change the fact that you didn’t really change anything in the country and chose to operate within the confines of the current political structure.
I think this is what Obama alluded to – and what so many liberals misunderstood – when he praised Reagan in the HuffPo interview some years ago and called out Clinton in the process(who in turn got even more embittered at Obama, driven by jealousy).
Obama’s health care act is the biggest domestic achievement of any president for decades and if the Iran deal – which will inevitably fail at keeping Iran from getting nukes, but that’s okay. These people aren’t going to use them wildly in some kamikaze mission – goes through, it will be seen as another big feather in Obama’s hat.
But the true significance of the Iran deal is not visavi Iran. It’s actually about the Israel lobby. If Obama could get a deal through the massive protests of the most consequentual foreign lobby in Washington which has had a near-strangehold on Middle Eastern policy since the mid-to-late 1980s up until now, the real legacy of this deal would mark the beginning of the end of the Israel lobby’s monolithic influence over U.S. Middle Eastern policy.
So even if the Iran’s stated objectives will fail in the end, as I assume, the lasting legacy would be Obama’s contributions to get a more independent and more moderate approach to a region which has seen so much destruction thanks to the dominance of the neocons and their lobby allies.
And that is one of the many reasons his presidency will be seen as historic, even beyond mere symbolism.
This issue already hit CSPAN WJ yesterday morning, in the form of questioning a Senator dissing the Iran Deal on his dual loyalty: http://jpupdates.com/2015/07/15/c-span-caller-questions-sen-cardins-u-s-loyalty-on-iran-deal/
Looks like, apropos the Iran Deal, “Jewish Geography” has come home to roost amid the 98% Gentiles in the US?
IMO, this is exactly what Netanyahu & AIPAC fear, that more Americans will look more closely at whether or not US & Israeli interests and values are identical. Bibi said to his crew what he fears most is Iran not cheating on the Iran Deal. If the US does not free itself from Israel Lobby, it will keep decreasing its own power and influence in the world, basically, Israel dragging down the USA’s reputation and economy with itself as US politicians keep competing as to who can show more love for Israel as the expense of US blood and treasure.
The split in the Israel Lobby has made this deal possible. Obama has himself admitted that change cannot happen without necessary input. Next challenge will be to defeat the J Street lobby because I don’t believe the liberal Zionist mindset can deliver the Palestinians (O’s bellicose non-nuclear related statements on Iran signal this limitation). The whole liberal Zionist character is to wax poetry dedicated to that soiled virgin named Israel (the Beinart thesis). The next stop, hopefully and urgently, will move the focus from this self-obsession to the real time, in flesh and blood portrait of the Palestinian and his overdue freedom from most cruel bondage.
Some excerpts from Zack Beauchamp’s article “This Iran deal is a disaster for Benjamin Netanyahu” in Vox today:
“But even if the deal does end up being good on net for Israel, there is just no debating that it is a complete disaster for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
This deal is a huge policy failure for Netanyahu, who in recent years has staked ever more of his legacy and political reputation on stopping it — even at the cost of setting back Israel’s relationship with the United States. Now he has nothing to show for it but a giant political embarrassment that his opponents on the right and left are already using against him.”
and:
“It’s hard to overstate how much of a defeat this is for Netanyahu. He lost the policy fight on his top issue. It would not be too far off to imagine this as akin to Obama losing the 2010 vote on Obamacare, if Obama had insisted that without Obamacare, America itself faced imminent destruction.
Netanyahu’s Iran policy has become a disaster, a boondoggle, a total belly flop. His top priority was blocking a deal, and he couldn’t get it done.”
Ouch.
The link: http://www.vox.com/2015/7/16/8974949/iran-nuclear-deal-netanyahu
If mw had a record of success in describing the middle east, had any record of any sort in describing a vision of the middle east and how we go from here to there, then mw’s wholehearted endorsement of the Iran pact would have some basis in reality, it would have a context in which it would fit. but mw knows only how to endorse mass rallies in cairo and not how to rule cairo. it only knows how to attack the dictators of Egypt and Saudi Arabia, not to describe the path of democracy and how to navigate the dangerous shoals that the Muslim Brotherhood presents. it only knows how to condemn those who wish to overthrow Assad but nary a word about Assad’s cruel regime. it only knows how to extol Hezbollah, but nary a word on how Lebanon is supposed to mature into a solid country rather than a country with a sectarian militia independent of the army. The Arab world: Iraq, Syria, Yemen are in turmoil. How does this pact fit into that? Show me some modicum of thoughtfulness on these issues then I would be forced to relate to your wholehearted endorsement of this pact in a context of thoughtfulness. but this site provides zero assessment of the middle east and its turmoils and its future and thus your endorsement of this pact is based upon ignorance and starry eyed “audacity of hope”. (and of course, opposition to Zionism).