Washington Examiner senior columnist Guy Benson said Monday the Trump administration “finally” ended the “delusion” of the Obama administration’s vision for Iran’s regime.
The United States’ strikes against Iran, carried out in collaboration with Israel, have brought comments by Barack Obama in 2015 back to the forefront, in which the then-president said Iran would gain access to $56 billion of its own money if the country “lives up to its commitments.” Obama also said that “even a repressive regime like Iran’s” can’t ignore the expectations of its people, and said analysts expect most of the country’s revenue would go toward improving Iran’s economy and the lives of its residents.
Benson, however, said there were people “back then” who argued that Obama’s predictions for Iran were “fatally naive.”
“His administration and the president himself, they were obsessed with appeasing or trying to draw the Iranian regime into the global community,” Benson said on Fox Business’s The Evening Edit. They enriched them, they cajoled them, they buttered up to them, they did everything they could to try to thaw those relations and remake the Middle East, I think, in a way that was always crazy and always doomed because of the evil nature of the regime.”
“They did it anyway. They shipped billions of dollars over there, some of it was sent in pallets of cash literally to the regime, and the promised reforms that we heard there from the president, the prediction that he made, ‘Oh, even a regime like this has to be accountable to its people, they have to follow through and deliver on needs for the population,’ that has not happened,” Benson said.
Benson concluded that “every single thing” the Obama administration envisioned for the Iranian regime has proven to be “an absolute fantasy,” and contended President Donald Trump “ended” this “delusion.”
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Obama has yet to address the U.S. strikes on Iran on X as of Tuesday morning.
Trump signaled Monday that the U.S. military campaign against Iran could stretch “four to five weeks.” Six U.S. service members have died since the launch of “Operation Epic Fury,” and Trump said in a weekend video that “there will likely be more before it ends.”
