President Obama's Empowerment of Iran

In a meeting during APEC with Malcolm Turnbull, the new prime minister of Australia, Obama described how he has watched Indonesia gradually move from a relaxed, syncretistic Islam to a more fundamentalist, unforgiving interpretation; large numbers of Indonesian women, he observed, have now adopted the hijab, the Muslim head covering.

Why, Turnbull asked, was this happening?

Because, Obama answered, the Saudis and other Gulf Arabs have funneled money, and large numbers of imams and teachers, into the country. In the 1990s, the Saudis heavily funded Wahhabist madrassas, seminaries that teach the fundamentalist version of Islam favored by the Saudi ruling family, Obama told Turnbull. Today, Islam in Indonesia is much more Arab in orientation than it was when he lived there, he said.[2]

On the 9/11 terror attacks on New York and Washington D. C., Goldberg revealed:

In the White House these days, one occasionally hears Obama’s National Security Council officials pointedly reminding visitors that the large majority of 9/11 hijackers were not Iranian, but Saudi.[3]

On Saudi treatment of women:

Obama himself rails against Saudi Arabia’s state-sanctioned misogyny, arguing in private that “a country cannot function in the modern world when it is repressing half of its population.” In meetings with foreign leaders, Obama has said, “You can gauge the success of a society by how it treats its women.[4]

On relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran:

Saudis need to “share” the Middle East with their Iranian foes. “The competition between the Saudis and the Iranians—which has helped to feed proxy wars and chaos in Syria and Iraq and Yemen—requires us to say to our friends as well as to the Iranians that they need to find an effective way to share the neighborhood and institute some sort of cold peace.[5]

Rather than remain trapped in the past, I’ve made it clear to Iran’s leaders and people that my country is prepared to move forward. The question now is not what Iran is against but, rather, what future it wants to build.[6]

Obama’s patience with Saudi Arabia has always been limited. In his first foreign-policy commentary of note, that 2002 speech in Chicago, he said:

Let’s fight to make sure our so-called allies in the Middle East—the Saudis and the Egyptians—stop oppressing their own people, and suppressing dissent, and tolerating corruption and inequality.[7]

These statements suggest that Obama’s empowerment of Iran could have been a strategy to punish Saudi Arabia for culpability for 9/11, for manipulating the Washington Playbook, for radicalizing Indonesia’s Islam, for state-sponsored misogyny, for suppressing dissent, and for tolerating corruption and inequality.

On July 14, 2015, negotiations between the P5+1 and Tehran were successfully concluded.[10] In return for a delay in its nuclear program for 15 years, Iran gained access to some $100 billion in frozen assets and became able to export oil, after forfeiting more than $160 billion in oil revenue since 2012 as a result of the sanctions.[11] Lifting economic sanctions on Iran shifted the balance of power in the Muslim Middle East in favour of Iran. It energized the Shi’ite Crescent and the March of Shi’ism.

1)   Ambivalence Toward the June 2009 Demonstrations by Millions of Iranians Following the Election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad[13]

2)   Derailing Drug Enforcement Administration’s Narcoterrorism Probe into Hezbollah

3)  The Transfer of $1.7 billion in banknotes to Iran

Obama’s eagerness for a successful JCPOA agreement may be gauged from the way the US transferred $1.7 billion to Iran. In the age of electronic money movement, the White House chose to transfer this huge amount in the form of banknotes. In January and February 2016, three planes, on three different dates, were used. The first planeload transferred $400 million, and the other two transferred another $1.3 billion.[21]The cash was first flown to Switzerland aboard an unmarked chartered aircraft, and then converted into Euros, Swiss Francs and other currencies. An Iranian transport aircraft flew the cash to Iran in January and February 2016 in three shipments. The first aircraft arrived in Tehran on Jan. 16, 2016, with $400 million piled on wooden pallets.[22]  Two other aircraft shipments of cash were sent on January 22, 2016, and February 5, 2016, totaling $1.3 billion.[23]

The Second Strategy that Empowered Iran – Obama’s Support of the Pro-Iran Prime Minister of Iraq, Nouri al-Maliki (2006-2014)

Obama’s decision to withdraw the last US soldier from Iraq at the end of 2011, left the door open to Iran to fill the gap left by the departing Americans. It allowed Maliki a free hand to further marginalize and abuse Iraq’s Sunnis.

Obama’s premature withdrawal from Iraq and his keen interest in the success of the P5+1 negotiations with Iran energized the Qom ayatollahs. They acted as if Washington has given them the green light to encroach upon their Sunni neighbours. The destruction of much of Syria followed.

Syria was not going to be allowed to derail Obama’s nuclear deal. Nor was Iran going to allow Obama to attack Assad, even if that meant walking away from the nuclear deal. Reportedly, Obama declined to enforce the red-line after Iran threatened to back out of the nuclear deal if Assad’s forces were bombed.[28] According to Wall Street Journal reporter Jay Solomon, "When the president announced his plans to attack [the Assad regime] and then pulled back, it was exactly the period in time when American negotiators were meeting with Iranian negotiators secretly in Oman to get the nuclear agreement."[29] The timing of Obama’s pull back is curious. On August 31, 2013, the US military strike against Syria for the chemical attack was unexpectedly put on hold, when Mr. Obama decided to first seek the approval of Congress. This approval never came.[30] Two days earlier, on August 29, 2013, Ed Miliband, leader of the Labor Party in the UK, scuttled a vote in parliament to bomb Assad’s forces for the chemical attack.[31] Were the two events coordinated?

Risks Obama Ignored

In empowering Iran, Mr. Obama opened the gates of hell wider than ever before in the Muslim Middle East. He ignored the realities and fundamental religious, political, and historical facts of the Middle East and Islam. As a student of history, the son of a father who “came from a Kenyan family that includes generations of Muslims,”[32] Mr. Obama should have known that there was no realistic possibility of “sharing” the Middle East between an Iran ruled by extreme Shi’ite clerics and a Saudi Arabia ruled by an equally extreme Sunni Wahhabi regime. The theological plus ethnic differences are too wide and the long history of war that separates Shi’ite Persians from Arab Sunnis is deeply ingrained in their collective memories.

The so-called Islamic State in Iraq and Syria was created by the Systemic marginalization of Iraq’s minority Sunnis by the Iran-controlled Shi’ite government in Baghdad during the eight-year reign of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki (2006–2014) and by Assad’s 10 percent Alawite regime against most of Syria’s 75 percent Sunni population since 1963. 

Outcomes of Obama’s Iran Policies

When Obama wrote his own version of the Washington Playbook, he set the stage for the restoration of relations with Iran after 38 years of estrangement since Ayatollah Khomeini deposed the Shah of Iran in 1979 and held 52 US diplomats and citizens as hostages for 444 days (November 4, 1979-January 20, 1981). In his rehabilitation of Iran, Mr. Obama’s new playbook upended US strategy in the Middle East. His actions were a win for the United States:  

·     It preoccupied Shi’ites and Sunni in wars thousands of miles away from the US in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen.

·     The confrontation with Iran left Riyadh with no option but to purchase more US weapons. The Obama administrationsold Riyadh $112 billion in weapons and another $110 billion package was under negotiation before the Trump administration took office, which materialized when President Trump visited Riyadh on May 20, 2017.[33]

·     Saudi fear of the Shi’ite Crescent paved the way to seeking good relations with Israel. It is an open secret that senior officials from Saudi Arabia meet with Israeli officials in Israel and outside the Middle East with the aim of establishing cooperative relations.[34]

The Snubbing of Obama in Riyadh

On January 20, 2017, when Obama left the White House, he left behind a Muslim Middle East on fire. He had dealt a severe blow to Arab Sunnis, brought them monumental losses and suffering, added gasoline to the fires of Sunni/Shi’ite wars that were started by G.W. Bush, and made the soil more fertile for big jihadist recruitment.

The Atlantic magazine’s interview was a humiliating public rebuke of Saudi governance and values from top to bottom. It was the last straw that broke the Saudi back.[37] Despite their desperate need for US protection, the King decided to say his farewell to a hostile president Obama, who was on his way out of the White House, with the biggest insult he knew how, in the hope that the next president would reverse course.

Obama was not welcomed at the airport by King Salman, as protocol provides, and not even by the foreign minister, but by a lowly governor of Riyadh, on his visit to Riyadh on April 20, 2016.  The King snubbed the US president despite the fact that on the same day, Saudi state television showed King Salman personally greeting officials from Gulf States at the airport.[38]In terms of Arab culture, un-graciousness towards a guest is the ultimate insult.[39]