Posted on August
16, 2015
Hardline To Swallow
Obama’s causes are not common to us
by
Daniel
Clark
While pitching his Iranian nuclear deal to an audience
at American University, President Obama said, “It’s those hardliners chanting ‘death
to America’ who have been most opposed to the deal. They’re making common cause with the
Republican Caucus.” The controversy
that’s arisen over that remark is curious, considering that the president has
all along condemned “hardliners” in both countries for criticizing the
agreement. In fact, after Arkansas
senator Tom Cotton voiced his objections in an open letter back in early March,
Obama said, “I think it’s somewhat ironic to see some members of Congress
wanting to make common cause with the hardliners in Iran.”
Mind you, there’s no more rigid an Iranian hardliner
than Ayatollah Khamenei, who actually did participate in a “death to America”
chant even as negotiations continued.
It’s a tautological fact that Obama and Khamenei, being the main parties
to the don’t-call-it-a-treaty agreement, have made common cause with each
other. Moreover, both the Iranian and
U.S. governments have acknowledged that the lifting of sanctions from Iran will
result in an increase in that nation’s funding of terrorism. Do you suppose Iranian-funded terror groups
like Hezbollah and Hamas have been rooting for Republican “hardliners” to
prevail? No, they’re making common cause
with the ayatollah and the president.
Just
because two parties desire the same outcome from a particular situation does
not mean that they share a “common cause.”
Yasir Arafat rejected what seemed like a total
diplomatic victory at the 2000 Camp David Summit, because he didn’t want to
give up his alleged grievances as a pretext for waging his campaign of
terror. Many conservatives expressed
relief at his obstinacy, not because they agreed with him, but because they
feared for Israel’s survival should the terms have been accepted. Likewise, if there are any Iranian hardliners
who oppose the nuke deal, their aims are in diametric opposition to those of
the Republicans, who believe the agreement enables Iran to develop nuclear
weapons, while at the same time throwing it an economic life preserver.
Any similar divergence between Obama’s goals and those
of America’s enemies remains elusive. In
exchange for merely slowing down Iran’s nuclear program, the president gave
them hundreds of billions of dollars in sanctions relief; yet he did not make
this lopsided agreement contingent on the release of the four Americans who are
being held as political prisoners. Those
people’s freedom should have been required before any other agreement could
take place. That wouldn’t have been too
much to ask, considering how little else we get from the deal.
This provides an obvious contrast with the case of
deserter Bowe Bergdahl, for whom Obama gave back five
high-ranking Taliban officials. At first
glance, the reason for the disparity seems obvious, in that Bergdahl
and his encrusted hippie parents are just the kind of people that the president
and his countercultural administration would value. In truth, he simply wanted to release the
terrorists because the Taliban had made it a precondition for future
negotiations. If he could have traded
them for a can of Spam, he would have done it all the same.
Obama
has loosened trade and travel restrictions toward Cuba, and normalized
diplomatic relations with that country, without requiring any change of
behavior from the Castro government. Any
arguable benefit to America from that policy change is negligible, but it
obviously benefits Cuba’s decaying Communist regime. Oh, and it provides opportunities for future
negotiations with another of our enemies.
Fidel Castro now says America owes him “many millions of dollars.” How confident are we that Obama disagrees?
In 2009, Communist president Manuel Zelaya of Honduras decided he wanted to remain in power
beyond the end of his term, so he tried to amend his nation’s constitution
through an illegal referendum, which was materially supported by Venezuelan
goon Hugo Chavez. The Honduran supreme
court unanimously disagreed, and Zelaya was
deposed. Guess whose side Obama was
on. While announcing his decision to
withhold aid from that country, and deny visas to its citizens, our president
demanded that the aspiring totalitarian Zelaya be
reinstated in the interest of “restoring democratic rule.”
America has nothing to gain by negotiating with
enemies whose aim is nothing short of our total destruction, or by propping up
and defending Communist brutes. There’s
no question that Obama has consistently and zealously made common cause with
our enemies, and the enemies of freedom in general. As long as he’s the one bringing up the
subject, he ought to be held to account for it.
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