Why Obama let Irans Green Revolution fail
Obamas quest to engage the mullahs
seems to have
influenced his decision-making on other
issues too
Eli Lake
One of the great hypotheticals of Barack Obamas presidency involves the Iranian uprising that began on June 12, 2009, after Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was announced the winner of contested presidential elections. What if the president had done more to help the protesters when the regime appeared to be teetering?
Its well known he was slow to react. Obama publicly downplayed the prospect of real change at first, saying the candidates whom hundreds of thousands of Iranians were risking their lives to support did not represent fundamental change. When he finally did speak out, he couldnt bring himself to say the election was stolen: The world is watching and inspired by their participation, regardless of what the ultimate outcome of the election was.
But Obama wasnt just reluctant to show solidarity in 2009, he feared the demonstrations would sabotage his secret outreach to Iran. In his new book, The Iran Wars, Wall Street Journal reporter Jay Solomon uncovers new details on how far Obama went to avoid helping Irans green movement. Behind the scenes, Obama overruled advisers who wanted to do what America had done at similar transitions from dictatorship to democracy, and signal Americas support. Solomon reports that Obama ordered the CIA to sever contacts it had with the green movements supporters. The Agency has contingency plans for supporting democratic uprisings anywhere in the world. This includes providing dissidents with communications, money, and in extreme cases even arms, Solomon writes. But in this case the White House ordered it to stand down.
At the time, Solomon reports, Obamas aides received mixed messages. Members of the Iranian diaspora wanted the president to support the uprisings. Dissident Iranians from inside the country said such support would be the kiss of death. In the end, Obama did nothing, and Irans supreme leader blamed him anyway for fomenting the revolt.
Its worth contrasting Obamas response with how the US has reacted to other democratic uprisings. The State Department, for example, ran a program in 2000 through the USembassy in Hungary to train Serbian activists in nonviolent resistance against their dictator, Slobodan Milosevic. Milosevic, too, accused his opposition of being pawns of the USgovernment. But in the end his people forced the dictator from power.
Similarly, when Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze met with popular protests in 2003 after rigged elections, George W. Bush dispatched James Baker to urge him to step down peacefully, which he did. Even the Obama administration provided diplomatic and moral support for popular uprisings in Egypt in 2011 and Ukraine in 2014.
Iran though is a very different story. Obama from the beginning of his presidency tried to turn the countrys ruling clerics from foes to friends. It was an obsession. And even though the president would impose severe sanctions on the countrys economy at the end of his first term and beginning of his second, from the start of his presidency, Obama made it clear the USdid not seek regime change for Iran.
Its debatable whether the US ever did support such a policy. But its striking the lengths to which Obama went to make good on his word. As Solomon reports, Obama ended USprograms to document Iranian human rights abuses. He wrote personal letters to Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei assuring him the USwas not trying to overthrow him. Obama repeatedly stressed his respect for the regime in his statements marking Irans annual Nowruz celebration.
His quest to engage the mullahs seems to have influenced Obamas decision-making on other issues too. When he walked away from his red line against Syrias use of chemical weapons in 2013, Solomon reports, both USand Iranian officials had told him that nuclear negotiations would be halted if he intervened against Bashar al-Assad.
Obama eventually did get a nuclear deal with Iran. Solomons book shines in reporting the details of the diplomacy that led to the 2015 accord. American diplomats held two sets of negotiations with Iran -- one public channel with the British, Chinese, European Union, French, Germans, Russians and the United Nations -- and another, bilateral track established through the Sultanate of Oman. In 2013, USofficials shuttled on public busses between two hotels in Geneva to conduct the two tracks before telling their negotiating partners about the formerly secret channel to Iran.
Eventually, the Iranians wore down the USdelegation. At the beginning of the talks in 2013, the USposition was for Iran to dismantle much of its nuclear infrastructure. By the end of the talks in 2015, Secretary of State John Kerry and his team agreed that Iran would then be allowed to build an industrial-scale nuclear program, with hundreds of thousands of machines, after a ten year period of restraint.
Other US red lines were demolished too. The final deal would allow the U.N. ban on Iranian missile development to phase out after eight years, and the arms embargo against Iran to expire after five. Iran would not have to acknowledge that it had tried to develop a nuclear weapon, even though samples the Iranians collected at its Parchin facility found evidence of man-made uranium.
In one particularly revealing passage, Solomon captures the thinking of Kerry, who engaged in detailed negotiations over the deal in the final months of the talks. So many wars have been fought over misunderstandings, misinterpretations, lack of effective diplomacy, Kerry told Solomon in a 2016 interview. War is the failure of diplomacy.
Kerrys diplomacy succeeded. But the Middle East got war nonetheless. The Revolutionary Guard continues to develop increasingly sophisticated weapons systems, including ballistic missiles inscribed with threats against Israel on their nose cones, Solomon writes in the books concluding chapter. Khamenei and other revolutionary leaders, meanwhile, fine-tune their rhetorical attacks against the United States, seeming to need the American threat to justify their existence.
There was a chance for a better outcome. There is no guarantee that an Obama intervention would have been able to topple Khamenei back in 2009, when his people flooded the streets to protest an election the American president wouldnt say was stolen. But it was worth a try. Imagine if that uprising had succeeded. Perhaps then a nuclear deal could have brought about a real peace. Instead, Obama spent his presidency misunderstanding Irans dictator, assuring the supreme leader America wouldnt aid his citizens when they tried to change the regime that oppresses them to this day.
Bloomberg
