Is Obama Failing in Afghanistan, the Middle East, and Iran?

by Patrick Seale

Released: 23 Nov 2009

According to the latest opinion polls, President Barack Obama’s approval rating in the United States has fallen to 49 per cent, the lowest recorded since his election. Undoubtedly, the high expectations he aroused both at home and abroad have been seriously eroded. Soaring rhetoric is one thing, actual achievement is another.

In foreign policy -- especially concerning the greater Middle East -- Obama’s cautious, conciliatory approach has all too often seemed like dithering, even at times like a failure of nerve.

On the Arab-Israeli conflict -- widely seen as the single most important reason for Arab and Muslim hostility to the United States -- he has allowed Israel’s far right Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to defy him. Although Obama called for a total freeze of Israeli settlements on occupied Palestinian land, building has continuing unabated, especially in Arab East Jerusalem. Obama’s spokesmen have expressed ‘dismay’, but have said or done nothing more.

On Afghanistan, the danger is that Obama’s long-awaited decision, due at the end of this month, could turn out to be a fudge. While his top military commander, General Stanley McChrystal, wants more troops, opinion both in the United States and among America’s European allies has turned sharply against the war. A bold American decision to disengage from the war, perhaps under the cover of an international conference -- to leave Afghanistan to the Afghans -- would be wise.

But Obama seems likely to choose a middle course which will satisfy no one. He may decide to send more troops, although fewer than his commander wants, and attempt to negotiate with ‘moderate’ Taliban, if any can be found, which is unlikely.

On Iran, too, Obama’s early attempt to put an end to thirty years of sterile hostility with the Islamic Republic seems to be heading nowhere. A deal, brokered last October by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), promised to defuse the dangerous crisis over Iran’s nuclear programme. Iran has not yet responded formally to the deal, but it does not look as if it will agree to it.

The proposal was for Iran to send 1,200 kilograms of low-enriched uranium -- some 75 per cent of its known supplies -- to Russia, and then on to France, for further reprocessing, before being returned to Tehran in the form of fuel rods for cancer treatment in a medical reactor.

At first, Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad seemed to accept the deal, when he hailed an “era of nuclear cooperation” with the West. But other prominent Iranians, such as the Speaker of the Parliament, Ali Larijani, denounced it as a Western trap. Obama was no better than his predecessor, George W. Bush, for talking of renewed sanctions, declared Larijani to applause and chants of “Death to America” in the chamber.

Before deciding what to do about Iran, Obama seems to want to delay until the end of the year, but he has angered Tehran by hinting at more sanctions. After talks with Russian President Dimitry Medvedev in Singapore last week, he warned that “We are running out of time...” And, after talks with South Korean President Lee Myung-bak in Seoul, he returned to the subject by saying, the Iranians “have been unable to get to ‘yes’, and so... we have begun discussions with our international partners about the importance of having consequences.”

What consequences can he have in mind? Mohamed AlBaradei, IAEA’s outgoing director-general is deeply disappointed: “I would hate to see that we are moving back to sanctions,” he said last Friday, “because sanctions at the end of the day... really don’t resolve issues.” In any event, China and Russia, deeply engaged with Iran commercially and strategically, will not support harsher sanctions.

The heart of Tehran’s objection to the IAEA deal is that it seems designed to prevent Iran from proceeding with uranium enrichment on its own soil, even for peaceful purposes -- although this is its clear right under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

The game was given away by France’s Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner. In an interview last week with the Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth, he declared: “We demanded to take a large quantity [of low-enriched uranium from Iran] because we do not want them -- while we are enriching uranium on their behalf -- to continue themselves enriching uranium, which could one day be used for military purposes.”

If this is indeed the West’s intention, it would hardly be surprising if Tehran rejected the deal. As reported on19 November, Iran’s Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki told ISNA, the student news agency: “Definitely, Iran will not send its 3.5 per cent enriched fuel out.”

Clearly, Tehran does not trust the West and suspects that it is attempting to reduce Iran to impotence. It is equally clear that the nuclear issue has exacerbated conflicts within Iran’s political elite, making agreement on a deal all the more difficult.

But the heart of the matter may lie in Iran’s perceived need for a deterrent capability. Faced with an oft-repeated threat of attack by Israel, and even by the United States itself, it wants the means to defend itself. This may not mean actually building a nuclear weapon. But it certainly seems to suggest that Iran’s ambition is to reach the so-called “threshold stage” -- that is to say to acquire the ability to assemble a nuclear weapon at speed if the situation warrants it.

Patrick Seale is a leading British writer on the Middle East, and the author of The Struggle for Syria; also, Asad of Syria: The Struggle for the Middle East; and Abu Nidal: A Gun for Hire.

Copyright © 2009 Patrick Seale – distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 23 November 2009
Word Count: 881
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Iran

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