In 2007, my combat platoon in Afghanistan was charged with surveying a site where hundreds of Taliban insurgents had been killed in U.S. air attacks. Sifting among the bodies, we collected weapons, documents and other evidence to send to intelligence experts for analysis. The analysts discovered that many of the weapons bore serial numbers that traced to factories in Iran.
It wasn’t the first evidence that Iran was providing aid to extremist groups like the Taliban and al Qaeda; the record of charges against the Islamic Republic is lengthy and well documented. The nation’s new president is hailed as a moderate, but Iran remains in the grip of a fanatical theocratic dictatorship which, 35 years after the Iranian revolution, continues to be implacably anti-American.
It is thus troubling to see the Obama administration’s attempts to negotiate with the Iranian theocrats. In rushing to secure a foreign policy legacy for himself, the president plays a dangerous game that serves only to empower an American enemy. It also makes the region even less stable.
The president’s most recent salvo was a secret letter sent in October to Ayatollah Ali Khameini, Iran’s Supreme Leader. Obama’s letter reportedly urged the ayatollah to work with Western powers to limit the Iranian nuclear program, and suggested working together to confront the threat posed by the Islamic State insurgency in Iraq and Syria.
That step follows upon last year’s equally misguided effort to roll back economic sanctions in exchange for token concessions from the Iranian regime. An agreement forged by Western powers, with United States leadership, allowed the Iranians to retain their already enriched uranium and most of their nuclear facilities. The administration trumpeted the agreement as a breakthrough, when in fact it left Iran’s infrastructure for building a nuclear weapon largely intact.
It’s odd that Obama has been so aggressive in courting Iran after having been so passive and lethargic in most other matters related to foreign affairs.
Obama was elected in 2008 in part because voters believed he could heal the damage his predecessor had supposedly done to America’s reputation around the world. But six years later, one would be hard-pressed to point to a single alliance or friendship that has been strengthened under this presidency. The president’s fumbling, inattentive and ham-handed approach to foreign policy has alienated our most steadfast allies.
Israel and Saudi Arabia, longstanding U.S. allies in the Middle East, are rightly alarmed by Obama’s courtship of the Iranian mullahs. The Israelis in particular see the Iranian nuclear program as a direct threat to their nation’s existence, and with good reason.
As recently as November 9, a few days after the news of Obama’s secret letter was published, Ayatollah Khameini posted to his Twitter account a list of reasons that Israel should be eliminated. And yet Obama continues to treat Khameini, an open advocate of Israeli genocide or at least ethnic cleansing, as a negotiating partner to be legitimized, flattered and cajoled.
It’s true that in the world of global affairs, uneasy alliances can be a necessity. When the United States entered Afghanistan to rout the Taliban after 9/11, for example, we forged working agreements with neighboring Pakistan, and over the course of that mission, serious questions emerged as to whose side the Pakistani military was actually on.
In Afghanistan, we saw repeated evidence that Pakistan was actively seeking to undermine the U.S. mission. Taliban fighters would engage U.S. forces and then slip across the border to find protective sanctuary in Pakistan, where they could not be pursued. In other instances, we discovered that Pakistan military personnel joined with Taliban fighters in attacks on U.S. troops.
Perhaps the Pakistan relationship in the war on terror will ultimately be seen to have been simply the “least bad” among various bad options. But the lesson is that we should always approach such uneasy alliances with clear eyes and a careful consideration of costs and benefits.
None of these considerations are evident in Obama’s reckless and misguided courtship of Iran.
Maybe Obama feels he just needs a foreign policy achievement in his final two years in office, to atone for the previous six years of drift and misjudgment. But he risks sparking a nuclear arms race in the Middle East as he goes about legitimizing a viciously anti-American regime. That would be no achievement to boast about.
The new Congress should put the brakes on the president’s runaway diplomacy with Iran before it’s too late.
Capt. Sean Parnell (ret.), a senior adviser to Concerned Veterans for America, is a retired U.S. Army Airborne Ranger who served in Afghanistan with the 10th Mountain Division. He is the author of The New York Times best-seller “Outlaw Platoon: Heroes, Renegades, Infidels, and the Brotherhood of War in Afghanistan.” Thinking of submitting an op-ed to the Washington Examiner? Be sure to read our guidelines on submissions for editorials, available at this link.
