The more successful Trump's reality-based policies towards Iran and
Israel are, the harder it will be for the foreign policy establishment to
restore their delusion-based policies when he leaves power.
Caroline B. Glick
For the past 40-odd years, two narratives have
guided American Middle East policy. Both were invented by the Carter
administration. One relates to Iran. One relates to Israel.
Both narratives reject reality as the basis for
foreign policy decision-making in favor of delusion. Over the past two months,
President Donald Trump has rejected and disavowed them both. His opponents are
apoplectic.
As far as Iran is concerned, as journalist Lee
Smith explained in Tablet online magazine this week, when Iranian
"students" seized the US Embassy in Tehran in November 1979 and held
52 Americans hostage for 444 days, they placed the Carter administration in a
dilemma: If President Jimmy Carter acknowledged that the "students"
weren’t students, but soldiers of Iran’s dictator Ayatollah Khomeini, the US
would be compelled to fight back. And Carter and his advisers didn't want to do
that.
So rather than admit the truth, Carter accepted
the absurd fiction spun by the regime that Khomeini was an innocent bystander
who, try as he might, couldn't get a bunch of "students" in central
Tehran to free the hostages.
At the base of their decision to prefer fantasy
to reality in regards to Iran was the hope that Khomeini and his
"students" would be satisfied with a pound or two of American flesh
and wouldn't cause Washington too many other problems.
So too, as Smith noted, the Carter
administration was propelled by guilt. The worldviews of many members of the
administration had been shaped on radical university campuses in the 1960s.
They agreed with the Iranian revolutionaries who cursed Americans as
imperialists. They perceived Khomeini and his followers as
"authentic" Third World actors who were giving the Americans their
comeuppance.
Khomeini and his "Death to America"
shouting followers got the message. They understood that Washington had given
them a green light to attack Americans in moderate and, as Smith put it,
"plausibly deniable" doses. it. For the next 40 years, Iran
maintained its aggression against America. And from Ronald Reagan to Barack
Obama, every president since Carter accepted and kept faith with Carter's
decision not to hold the Iranian regime responsible for the acts of aggression
and war it carried out against America through proxies.
During the Iraq War from 2003-2011, Iran's
aggression reached new heights. Iran organized the Shiite militias that waged
war against the US forces in Iraq. It also supported Al-Qaida in Iraq which
organized in Iran and used Iran as its logistical base for operations.
More than six hundred American forces were
killed and thousands were wounded in attacks carried out with Iranian-made
improvised explosive devices, (IADs). Yet rather than confront Iran for its
aggression and take action against it, the Bush administration tried to make a
deal with the mullahs.
Under Obama, reaching an accord with Iran was
the singular goal of US foreign policy. Every other goal was subordinated to
Obama's burning desire to appease Iran at the expense of Israel and the US's
Sunni Arab allies.
This then brings us to President Trump. Trump's
decision to kill Qassem Soleimani – who as commander of the Iranian
Revolutionary Guards Corps’ Quds Force was the head of all of Iran's regional
and global terror apparatuses – destroyed the Carter administration's Iran
narrative.
Soleimani was killed in Baghdad along with Abu
Mahdi al-Muhandis, the commander of one of the Soleimani-controlled Shiite
militias in Iraq. Iraqi protesters, who have been demonstrating against Iran's
control over their government since last October claim that Soleimani was the
one who ordered al-Muhandis to kill the demonstrators. More than 500
demonstrators have been killed by those forces in Iraq over the past three
months.
By killing the two together, the Americans
exposed the big lie at the root of 40 years of American deliberate blindness to
the reality of Iranian culpability and responsibility for the acts of terror
and aggression its surrogates have carried out against America and its allies.
By killing Soleimani, Trump made clear that the
blank check for aggression the previous six presidents gave Tehran is now
canceled. From now on, the regime will be held responsible for its actions.
From now on US policy towards Iran will be based on reality and not on
escapism.
The second false narrative that has formed the
basis of US Middle East policy since Carter is that Israel and the so-called
"occupation" are responsible for the absence of peace in the Middle
East. Moved largely by Carter's hostility towards the Jewish state, his
administration was the first to call Israel's control over Judea and Samaria an
"occupation." It determined, through a 1978 memo authored by Arthur
Hansell, the State Department’s legal adviser, that the mere existence of
Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria constituted a breach of international
law.
Because the Hansell memo was based on a wholly
specious interpretation of the Fourth Geneva Convention from 1949, and had no
basis in actual international law, the Reagan administration refused to adopt
it. But that didn't stop Ronald Reagan from adopting the anti-Israel substance
of Carter's policy narrative. Just as Reagan turned a blind eye to Iran's
responsibility for the terror attacks its proxies carried out against the
United States – including the bombing of the US Embassy in Beirut in April
1983, and the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut in November 1983 – so he
substantively accepted Carter's anti-Israel narrative which blamed Israel for
the absence of Middle East peace. Reagan appointed veteran diplomat Philip
Habib to serve as his special envoy for Middle East peace. Habib put together a
"peace plan" predicated on the notion of Israeli guilt.
The first Bush administration, the Clinton
administration, the second Bush administration and of course, the Obama
administration all held to the Carter line that blamed Israel and its control
over Judea and Samaria, (and Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights, and – until 2005
– Gaza), for the unrest and instability of the region. Obama, of course, went
full circle. He adopted the Hansell memo as US official policy and enabled the
UN Security Council to pass a resolution criminalizing the existence of Jewish
communities beyond the 1949 armistice lines.
The fact that the Carter narrative was
self-evidently ridiculous and destabilizing made no impression on these
successive administrations. PLO aggression and refusal to either disavow
terrorism or accept Israel's right to exist in any borders were brushed aside
as irrelevant and unwelcome information.
Israel's profound concessions for peace were
pocketed, poo-pooed and forgotten.
Last November, the Trump administration put
paid the phony narrative of Israeli avarice with Secretary of State Mike
Pompeo's announcement that the administration was disavowing the Hansell memo
and replacing it with an accurate international law-based assessment that
Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria are not inherently illegal.
Wednesday, while the world was awaiting Trump's
response to Iran's failed missile attack against Iraqi bases housing US forces,
the Kohelet Policy Forum held a conference on the legal and diplomatic
significance of Pompeo's announcement. In a pre-recorded message for the
conference, Pompeo briefly explained why he decided to disavow the Hansell
memo. His explanation could be equally applied to the Trump administration's
policy towards Iran.
In Pompeo’s words, “It is important that we
speak the truth when the facts lead us to it. And that's what we've done.”
For the American foreign policy establishment,
Trump's refusal to continue their forty-year marriage of policy to delusion is
an unforgivable transgression, and a threat. Not only has he committed the
crime of rejecting their collective "wisdom," his reality-based
policies might actually be working. The threat to them is obvious.
If Trump's reality-based policies succeed, he
will dismantle their foreign policy legacy. All their protestations of wisdom,
all their fancy resumes and titles as former senior officials will lose their
allure and market value.
Since Pompeo's statement regarding the Israeli
communities in Judea and Samaria related to an issue which, while critical, is
less in the headlines today than it was under Obama, aside from a few
peremptory condemnations, the foreign policy aristocrats ignored it. As they
saw it, once they return to power and start working with an Israeli government
led by someone other than Benjamin Netanyahu, the anti-Israel phony narrative
will be restored to its rightful place as the foundation of US policy.
The Iran story is different. Days before the
drone strike that killed him, Soleimani tried to re-enact the 1979
"student" takeover of the US Embassy in Tehran with
"protesters" in Baghdad. But this time it didn't work. And Soleimani
paid with his life for his failure. Iran's half-hearted, failed missile attack
against US forces in Iraq showed that the Iranian regime is terrified of Trump
and their reversal of fortune.
Trump's policies expose the mendacity and rank
insanity of his predecessors’ policies towards Iran and Israel. Since Obama's policies
were particularly radical, divorced from reality and devastating, Trump has
reasonably singled them out for particular rebuke and condemnation. Among other
things, reasonably, Trump said the missiles Iran shot at US forces in Iraq were
paid for by the 150 billion dollars in sanctions relief and 1.8 billion dollars
in cash that flowed to the coffers of the IRGC through the 2015 nuclear
agreement.
Rather than keep quiet as their signature
policy was exposed as a strategic disaster, Obama administration officials and
their supporters in Congress and the media went into very public paroxysms of
rage. Ben Rhodes, Obama's deputy national security adviser and chief
propagandist, who sold the nuclear deal to a credulous and eager media, said
Trump's move would lead to war. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said that the US
strike against Soleimani was "disproportionate," hinting it was a war
crime to kill the terrorist who had just ordered the seizure of a US Embassy.
She scheduled a Congressional session to curb Trump's power to confront Iranian
aggression and nuclear proliferation.
On cue, a group of psychiatrists wrote an open
letter to Congress insisting that Trump is crazy and must be restrained. (The
same group has written several nearly identical letters since Trump took
office.)
To protect and preserve their 40-year old
delusion-based policy, Trump's domestic opponents are effectively supporting
the Iranian regime against the United States. And as they see it, they have no
choice. They are in a race against time. The more successful Trump's
reality-based policies towards Iran on the one hand and Israel on the other
are, the harder it will be for the foreign policy establishment to restore
their delusion-based policies when he leaves power. Given the stakes, we can
assume that their attempts to clip Trump's wings and debase him will increase
in intensity, churlishness and irrationality as time goes by and as his
successes mount.
Caroline B. Glick, Israel Hayom, January 10, 2020
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