Words and deeds: Obama and Iran

Many disappointed Obama supporters maintain that the president has betrayed the progressive agenda he once espoused. I would counter that he never was a liberal -- he merely played one on TV.

One classic example: Obama's multi-facial attitude toward Iran.

His campaign duplicity has gained new relevance after the recent federal seizure of various mosques and a skyscraper in New York, due to alleged covert ties to Iran.

In this earlier post, we looked into Obama's shifting stances on Iran. I shall recap.

During his ever-so-brief senate career, Barack Obama co-sponsored something called the "Counter-Proliferation Act of 2007," which did not become law.This act was controversial because it identified the Iranian Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist organization.

As you may recall, most prog-blog commentators considered any such identification reckless. The Revolutionary Guard is a national army, and we are supposed to be at war with terrorism. Thus, the act technically could be used to justify war with the Iranian army.

To placate leftish critics, Obama pulled off a neat trick. He did not reverse his co-sponsorship. He did not express regret or admit error. He did not really do anything. Instead, he gave campaign speeches opposing the Kyl-Lieberman resolution, which offered the same IRG = terror equation.

Those speeches sufficed to make the prog-bloggers happy. The bots did not notice that all Obama ever offered were words. Just words.

When it came time for action, Barack Obama made a point of not showing up for a vote on the Kyl-Lieberman resolution. In other words, he refused to take a stance that might come to haunt him in the general election.

It gets worse: Then-Senator Hillary Clinton passed around a statement intended to make clear that the Bush administration should not construe the Kyl-Lieberman amendment as an excuse for war. (At the time, everyone feared that Mad Dick and Little George wanted to justify heaving bombs at Tehran.) Hillary asked Barack Obama to sign that letter.

He wouldn't.

Nevertheless, many progressives formed the bizarre hallucination that it was Hillary who wanted war with Iran, while Obama (in their eyes) stood for peace and diplomacy.

When ambassador Joe Wilson (the husband of Valerie Plame/Wilson, who had been screwed over by the Bushies) scored candidate Obama for his Janus-like stance on Iran, the Obot brigades responded by smearing Wilson and his courageous wife. Daily Kos published a particularly mind-boggling reaction -- a comment which reflects the sentiment then prevailing within "progressive" circles:

Obama will NOT let the criminality of government remain the status quo.....Clinton would of covered up for Bush and the CIA etc like her husband did, Obama will NOT and Larry and his buddies and Joe and Valeries budddies may just be caught for whatever criminal acts they were part of.....

(The "Larry" here is, of course, Larry Johnson, the former CIA analyst with whom I've fallen into severe disagreement. That contretemps is irrelevant to our story.) The above-quoted words were published in mid-2008. I still have no idea what "criminal acts" are to be laid at the feet of the honorable and brave Wilsons.

When Obama attained power, he got his revenge against Joe Wilson. Obama directed his Justice Department to halt the Wilsons' civil lawsuit against Dick Cheney, Karl Rove and Scooter Libby, who conspired to reveal Valerie Wilson's CIA employment. In essence, Obama provided legal cover for the chancred and leprous asses of Dubya's most vile henchmen.

And how did the progressives react? For example, did Randi Rhodes -- who spent years feasting on the Wilson/Plame scandal -- denounce Obama for siding with Dubya's evildoers against the people she had once championed?

No, she did not. At least not within my hearing. (If you know otherwise, please enlighten me.)

And that, my friends, is Barack Obama. He is a man who ran against the Bush/Cheney legacy, yet ended up protecting Bush and Cheney. He is a man who, on the issue of Iran, told lefties what they wanted to hear, yet consistently refused to match action to rhetoric.

Now Obama has taken what may be a provocative step against Iran -- and his actions seem to have won some very grudging respect from the likes of Michelle Malkin. Obama will maintain sanctions against Iran. The neoconservative Wall Street Journal is demanding that Obama end all attempts at diplomacy with Iran -- and the current federal seizures give the administration political cover for doing exactly as the WSJ prescribes.

Meanwhile, we have this disturbing note from DEBKAfile (that is to say, from Mossad):

Prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu and President Barack Obama focused on the single subject of Iran when they met in Washington Monday, Nov. 9 - as did Netanyahu and French president Nicolas Sarkozy in Paris, Wednesday, Nov. 11. Iran also occupied the meeting between defense minster Ehud Barak and US defense secretary Robert Gates Monday. DEBKAfile’s Washington sources disclose that briefings to the media and joint communiqués were disallowed for the sake of blacking out the content of the conversations Israeli leaders held in Washington and Paris.

Leaked reports that the Palestinian issue and Mahmoud Abbas’ future were discussed in Washington and peace talks with Syria in Paris were window-dressing, as were the power games widely reported as leading up to the Netanyahu’s reception at the White House.

The conversation in Sarkozy’s private apartment at the Elysee was a continuation of Netanyahu’s talks with Obama two days earlier and marked their coalescence around the next steps on Iran.

Back home, the defense minister stressed the importance of “not discounting the peace signals coming of late from Syria” and said that “many barriers fell” at the Netanyahu-Obama meeting “recreating a good foundation for renewing the peace process and reaching accord with our Palestinian neighbors.”

This statement was part of the smoke screen set up by mutual consent to conceal the content of Barak and the prime minister’s overseas meetings. It was necessary to addressing the minister’s need to bolster his shaky position as leader of the left-leaning Labor party and lift Israel’s image in Europe which is fixated on the Palestinian issue.

At the same time, a very senior American official told DEBKAfile that his description of falling barriers between President Obama and prime minister was spot on and deserved a full stop.

After reading that, the timing of the New York seizures makes rather more sense, doesn't it?

Obama says that the recent federal action resulted from an investigation he inherited from Bush. Perhaps. We shall see.

What we know is this: As a candidate, Obama spoke like a prudent peacenik on Iran, yet his actions have always lurched toward neo-conservatism. His foreign policy mentor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, may be considered a neo-con of a certain type. Zbig is not Ledeen -- he's something different -- but that doesn't make him one of the good guys.

Obama's sponsorship of that once-notorious legislation (the one which placed the "terrorist" label on the Iranian Revolutionary Guard) makes the following piece of speculation worth pondering:

So is the Obama Administration involved in the attacks on the Iranian Revolutionary Guard conference in Sistan-Baluchistan?

Note: Sistan-Baluchistan is a war-torn province of Iran, the home of a Sunni insurgency against the Shi'ite regime in Tehran. (It's also a key area in the heroin trade.) Intriguingly, an Al Qaeda-linked group named Jundallah has been credited with the attack on the Iranian Guard. If the Obama administration was (as the writer implies, and as the Iranians have plainly stated) the secret sponsor behind an attack carried out by an Al Qaeda ally -- well. This movie just became really intriguing.

One of the main forces behind the foreign policy of President Obama is Brzezinski, a realist and someone who has talked about Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan all becoming destabilized, including in front of the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in 2007. The concept of a geo-political “black hole” is also his. Also, the Iranian government has categorically stated that the U.S. and Britain where the forces behind the October 18, 2009 attacks on a dialogue amongst Sistan-Baluchistan’s Shiite Muslim and Sunni Muslim leaders sponsored by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. Most likely the answer is yes. While the U.S. government is also negotiating with Tehran, America has not ended its covert meddling and destabilization operations against Iran. Barack Obama is continuing the last American administration’s proxy war on Iran from the Iranian border with Iraq to Sistan-Baluchistan.

Could proxy war lead to war war? Indeed it could.

Where, I wonder, is Hillary in all of this?