Who Killed Engagement with Iran?

Jonathan Tobin
Contentions/Commentary
03 November 09

The collapse of President Obama’s daft strategy for “engaging” with the tyrants of Tehran has left his cheering section with some terrible questions. After spending months soft-pedaling Iran’s stolen election, abuse of dissidents, as well as the danger from its funding of terrorists and, of course, the threat from its drive for nuclear weapons, the administration thought it had fixed the problem with the deal it negotiated to have the Iranians ship their enriched uranium out of the country for processing. It was doubtful that the deal would have worked or that the Iranians wouldn’t have cheated. But Tehran’s rejection of the pact that its representatives had negotiated has the Obama camp thoroughly perplexed.

Their problem is that they can’t accept the obvious answer to the question as to why their solution has been sunk. Having been warned by skeptics of engagement that the Iranians’ only objective in negotiations was to prevaricate, the administration now finds itself scrambling for an explanation as to why their goodwill and generous offers have gotten them exactly nowhere. But ready as always with an explanation for their dilemma is the New York Times, which served up a healthy serving of excuses today in an article designed to rationalize both Iran’s stalling and Washington’s failed strategy. The piece, titled “Iran’s Politics Stand in the Way of a Nuclear Deal With the West,” claims that left to his own devices, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would love to ratify the pact and fulfill its requirements. But he can’t, says author Michael Slackman, because Iranian dissidents as well as a pesky school of “pragmatic conservatives” won’t let him get away with it. According to Slackman, liberal foes of the regime such as former presidential candidate Mir Hussein Moussavi, are trying to score points with the public by hammering Ahmadinejad as insufficiently nationalist, while the “pragmatists” to the right of him think he is betraying the Islamist cause by allowing the West to “cheat” Iran.

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