A White House Denial
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
The White House is denying a report that President Obama is hatching plans for a visit to Tehran. We wouldn’t want to say we don’t believe the White House. But neither would be surprised if a presidential trip is being explored. A summit with the Iranian mullahs, or their “democratically elected” front-men, must be awfully tempting to Mr. Obama. How else to avoid a debacle in the 2014 by-election, after the end of illusions in respect of Obamacare?
The report that Mr. Obama is planning a trip was reported by one of the three biggest Kuwaiti papers, Al-Jarida. It plays into the sense that Mr. Obama is way out ahead of his skis. The Kuwaiti paper quoted an American diplomat as saying that Mr. Obama’s desire for a visit is shared by the mullahs and that the two sides “are waiting for the conclusion of the arrangements prior to Iranian President Hassan Rohani issuing an official invitation to his American counterpart to visit Tehran.”
The quotes are from the Weekly Standard’s account of the story. According to the quoted diplomat, the “most important detail” awaiting resolution “is the question of a meeting with Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and the possibility of not holding the meeting.” The Kuwaiti paper quoted its source as saying that Mr. Obama wants “to show that he is an advocate of peace and dialogue even with those who chant death to America.”
The question is: Why? Why would we want peace even with those who chant death to America? And death to Israel. What is the logic of it? We’re not against peace. But why do we want peace with those who chant death to America? The idea that all this should follow from the Geneva pact, where nothing is agreed until everything is agreed and everything hasn’t yet been agreed, would suggest that Mr. Obama knows something he hasn’t shared with the rest of his countrymen.
It would suggest Mr. Obama reckons that the Mullahs don’t hate Israel and America and that the recent difficulties have been merely about the Iranian effort to build an atomic bomb? Count us out of this line of thinking. Our beef is not with the fact that the mullahs want an A-bomb, though we’re against their efforts to gain one. It is with their unrelenting hostility to America, to Israel, and to true Iranian democracy. So the White House denial of the Kuwaiti report is something to mark. And remembering as 2014 unfolds.
