Barack Obama’s Regrets on Iran

A nadir of Barack Obama’s presidency was in 2009, when he failed to endorse the goal of demonstrations that erupted throughout Iran following a presidential election that hundreds of thousands of protesting Iranians considered stolen. For a few weeks in June that year, it looked like Iran might have been on the precipice of revolution. Now that Iran looks like it may be on that precipice again, Mr. Obama says he regrets how he handled the Iranian uprising in 2009. Speaking during a podcast, Pod Save America, the 44th president said, “When I think back to 2009, 2010, you guys will recall there was a big debate inside the White House about whether I should publicly affirm what was going on with the Green Movement.”“Because a lot of the activists were being accused of being tools of the West,” Mr. Obama continued. “And there was some thought that we were somehow gonna be undermining their street cred in Iran if I supported what they were doing. And in retrospect, I think that was a mistake.”Mr. Obama’s decision had ramifications that were not known fully at the time. As a former Wall Street Journal reporter, Jay Solomon, reported in his fine 2016 book, “The Iran Wars,” Mr. Obama ordered the CIA to sever contacts with Iran’s green movement and put on hold contingency plans to provide the movement with cash and communications gear. The former president was not entirely candid in his explanation of his failure in 2009. He was concerned not only that any outward American support for the Iranian protesters may discredit them; he also did not want to undermine his own diplomatic outreach to the tyrant Iranians were protesting against, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.That was a bigger moral and strategic blunder. Part of Mr. Obama’s strategy with Iran was to demonstrate that America had no plans to encourage a democratic transition for the Islamic Republic. What was he thinking? He wrote direct letters to Mr. Khamenei saying this explicitly. What other American president would do that? His administration also cut funding for programs to document Iranian human rights abuses.All of this was part of a strategy that eventually led to the 2015 nuclear bargain known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. In exchange for sanctions relief, Iran agreed to limit temporarily its enrichment of uranium. The bargain allowed Iran to keep its vast nuclear infrastructure as well as affirming the right of Iran to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes.While Mr. Obama regrets not supporting the Iranian uprising in 2009, he also still supports the 2015 bargain that enriched the oppressors of the Iranian people. “I continue to believe that the Iran nuclear deal was a really important thing for us to do to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon,” he told the podcast.This is also the view of President Biden. Last week, the state department spokesman, Ned Price, said that the administration was not focused on reviving the 2015 deal for now and that supporting the protests was a priority. At the same time, the administration is not ruling out a deal at some point.This approach may sound prudent. If the latest uprising does not succeed, then America still has the option to negotiate temporary limits on the nuclear program. The problem is that any deal with the regime will also undermine the democratic resistance. The best way to stop the regime from building nuclear weapons is to help the Iranians trying to overthrow it. Russiagate Was Worse than You ThoughtThe last trial for the United States special counsel, John Durham, which concludes this week, is a moment to pay attention to what he has disclosed about the FBI, an institution he has chosen not to prosecute — at least not in a courtroom. The trial is focused on Igor Danchenko, a Russian national who collected most of the rumor and innuendo in an opposition research project for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign. Mr. Danchenko was hired as a contractor for a former British spy, Christopher Steele, and was the “primary sub source” for the dossier that alleged a well-developed conspiracy between Donald Trump’s campaign and the Kremlin.Mr. Durham charged Mr. Danchenko with five counts of lying to the FBI. One of those counts was dismissed by the judge last week. The theory of the case is that Mr. Danchenko duped the bureau in its investigation of the Steele dossier.Yet the most explosive information to come out of the trial is in respect of the FBI and Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team of prosecutors. Mr. Durham, for one thing, disclosed that a supervisory FBI analyst named Brian Auten was recommended to be suspended for his role in overseeing the surveillance warrant applications for a low-level Trump campaign volunteer named Carter Page.As Mr. Auten appealed his disciplinary hearing over the surveillance warrant, he was given an important role in the investigation into Hunter Biden, according to whistleblowers who approached Senator Grassley this summer. Mr. Auten, according to the whistleblowers, wrongly flagged legitimate derogatory information about Mr. Biden as Russian disinformation, throwing up a roadblock in the investigation into the president’s son.

Barack Obama’s Regrets on Iran

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