Obama Passed the Buck. Trump Refused to Play.
The Iran deal was never meant to stop Iran from building a bomb—it was supposed to delay it until disaster happened on someone else’s watch
By Lee Smith
January 13, 2020 • 8:06 PM
In the wake of the targeted killing of Iranian terror master Qassem Soleimani, an interesting fight has broken out—after Donald Trump failed to brief them in advance of the strike, Democrats began fulsomely criticizing the president. This led Republican lawmakers to accuse their counterparts across the aisle of pro-terrorist sympathies. Maybe Republicans are still sore that Barack Obama compared them to Iranian hardliners like Soleimani for denouncing his signature foreign policy initiative, the Iran nuclear deal, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Or maybe it’s something else.
Because the fact is that the Democrats are not pro-terrorist. They’re simply intent on protecting the historic agreement that legalized the nuclear weapons program of a terror state.
Democratic leadership is angry it wasn’t briefed before the operation, as were some Republican lawmakers critical of the scant information in the White House intelligence briefing on the attack. But there is reason to believe senior Democrats would have leaked it to the press, as they’ve done repeatedly over the last three years to prosecute their anti-Trump campaign. In particular, House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff and his staff have used CNN as a platform to push the discredited Trump-Russia collusion narrative. Why would Democrats endanger U.S. national security by leaking highly classified plans of a major operation against a terror leader? Because Soleimani was the centerpiece of the nuclear deal.
The JCPOA was the instrument Obama used to secure the administration’s ultimate goal—realigning U.S. interests with those of Iran. For the U.S. to be able to minimize its footprint in the Middle East, the Obama White House needed a proxy force—much like the Iranians use proxies to advance their interests. Soleimani managed Iranian proxies and Obama, who praised the late commander, believed he was capable of stabilizing the region on behalf of America.
In 2015, when the JCPOA went into effect, Soleimani was removed from the U.N. sanctions list, a provision that, according to press reports at the time, the Iranians saw as “nonnegotiable.” That’s how Obama wanted it, too.
As I explained in Tablet last week, Obama had subscribed to the myth that U.S. policymakers had built up around Iran over 40 years—that the third-world obscurantist regime was in fact a formidable power that the U.S. dare not challenge lest it risk an apocalyptic war. Seen from Obama’s perspective, a nation this powerful was—unlike the incoherent Arabs, OR tiny Israel—singularly capable of maintaining order.
Former Bush administration Senior Director for the Middle East Michael Doran said on Twitter he had knowledge of messages from the Obama administration to Soleimani. “We don’t know the subject matter of the messages,” Doran told Tablet, “but given the tenor of Obama’s letters to [Supreme Leader Ali] Khamenei, it is a reasonable assumption that the administration wrote to Soleimani to court him rather than to deter him.” A senior U.S. official confirmed to Tablet the existence of the messages from the Obama administration to Soleimani.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo also wrote the late terror master. In December 2017, the then CIA director said he’d warned Soleimani that the Trump administration would hold him and “Iran accountable for any attacks on American interests in Iraq by forces that are under their control.” The targeted killing that brought down Soleimani and his Iraqi deputy, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, two weeks ago made good on that warning.
The nuclear program, the regime’s crown jewel, is controlled not by the imaginary moderates who want rapprochement with the Great Satan. It is rather in the hands of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and the expeditionary unit Soleimani led, the Quds Force, which have been waging war on the U.S. and its allies for four decades. This is why the previous White House did not stand with the Iranian protesters who filled the streets in 2010. The Iranian security forces shooting civilians in the streets were the same people with whom Obama needed to make a deal. Taking sides against them would have made that harder; likely impossible.
Trump, by contrast, says he is not that interested in making a deal. “I couldn’t care less if they negotiate,” he tweeted Sunday about Iranian leadership. “Will be totally up to them but, no nuclear weapons and ‘don’t kill your protesters.’”
Trump has thereby distinguished himself from his predecessor. The world’s most famous dealmaker appears not to be angling for a deal, and for good reason—there’s no deal to be had because there’s nothing left to negotiate. Obama set it up that way. The JCPOA guaranteed that the Iranians would all but have a bomb within 10 years—or by the end of the second term of Obama’s successor.
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