The Obama administration has spent a lot of time defending Iran as it pushes for approval of the nuclear agreement, to the point where many skeptics of the process have complained that the White House is acting as “Iran’s lawyer.”
“Anything that threatens the regime threatens both the deal and Obama’s strategy for the region, which is why the administration often sounds like Iran’s lawyer,” wrote Tony Badran, a research fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies in the Beirut-based NOW Lebanon website.
That concern may also be resonating with the American public, as polls show declining support for the administration’s approach since it signed a deal giving Iran relief from international sanctions in exchange for putting its nuclear program on ice for 10 years.
Iran’s Shiite Muslim theocracy is not popular in the United States, where bad feelings linger from the November 1979 seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran by a revolutionary mob who held 52 U.S. diplomats hostage for 444 days. Iran has never apologized for the incident.
Only 11 percent of Americans held a favorable image of the country in a February Gallup poll, the lowest of 22 countries in the survey and a figure that has remained relatively consistent for more than 25 years. Even in pre-July polling that showed majorities of Americans supporting the nuclear talks, most of those polled said they could not trust Iran to keep its bargain.
But President Obama and other senior administration officials continue to defend the deal by defending Iran. Here are four recurring themes:
1. They have the right.
Among the things senior administration officials have said Iran has the right to possess is a peaceful nuclear program and conventional ballistic missiles. Though the administration has not gone as far as saying Iran has a right to enrich uranium as Tehran insists, Secretary of State John Kerry said Tuesday that the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty “is silent on the right to enrich. It doesn’t grant people automatically a right to enrich. But the NPT also doesn’t ban it. It doesn’t say you can’t enrich.”
Kerry also defended the eventual lifting of the U.N. arms embargo under the deal, telling the House Foreign Affairs Committee Iran had “a very legitimate argument” for lifting it immediately, and Washington won a “victory” by getting it extended for up to five years.
2. Don’t upset them.
Concerns about upsetting Iran’s leaders have shadowed Obama’s policy toward that country since he took office. It was one of the factors that played into the passive U.S. response to the Green Revolution of 2009, and is widely believed to be a reason why the administration won’t act against Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, who depends heavily on Tehran’s support to stay in power.
During two years of negotiations, Obama and his international partners agreed to to keep discussions of ballistic missiles out of the nuclear talks after Tehran refused to continue them if that issue was not excluded. But then, at the last minute, they agreed to lift an embargo on ballistic missile technology transfers to Iran when Tehran suddenly brought the issue back into the talks.
Kerry built on that theme in an interview published Aug. 5 with Atlantic writer Jeffrey Goldberg, saying of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader that “the ayatollah constantly believed that we are untrustworthy, that you can’t negotiate with us, that we will screw them.”
Congressional rejection of the deal “will be the ultimate screwing,” he added, noting that “the United States Congress will prove the ayatollah’s suspicion, and there’s no way he’s ever coming back. He will not come back to negotiate. Out of dignity, out of a suspicion that you can’t trust America. America is not going to negotiate in good faith. It didn’t negotiate in good faith now, would be his point.”
3. Americans don’t give them enough credit.
In testimony before Congress and in interviews, Kerry has consistently noted that Iran has been well-behaved since signing an interim nuclear deal in November 2013.
“What nobody gives Iran any credit for — let alone the administration — is the fact that we’re already two years into full compliance with an interim agreement,” he said Tuesday.
In fact, nonpartisan nuclear experts have noted that Iran had been cheating on the interim deal all along.
4. They deserve to be mad at us.
In 1953, Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh was overthrown in a coup supported by the CIA and British intelligence. Mossadegh, who had been democratically elected in 1951 but was by then ruling by decree, was ousted by Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi with the support of loyal military elements as well as the religious establishment which now rules Iran.
Nevertheless, U.S. complicity in the coup has been a centerpiece of the theocratic regime’s grievance narrative against the United States.
Obama has accepted that narrative, mentioning several times since taking office that the United States had a role in overthrowing a “democratically elected” government in Iran, the first time being in his June 2009 speech to the Muslim world in Cairo.
“Even with your enemies, even with your adversaries, I do think that you have to have the capacity to put yourself occasionally in their shoes, and if you look at Iranian history, the fact is that we had some involvement with overthrowing a democratically elected regime in Iran,” Obama told New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman in a July 14 interview.
