What the (Bleep) Just Happened? (37 page)

As those “negotiations” were going on, the Manhattan District Attorney’s office unsealed a 118-count indictment accusing a Chinese national of setting up fake companies to hide his sale of millions of dollars in potential nuclear materials to Iran. And then in late July 2011, Obama’s own Treasury Department accused Iranian authorities of aiding al-Qaeda in Iran, Kuwait, Qatar, and Pakistan. A few months after that, in October 2011, Obama’s Justice Department busted two men with ties to Iran for allegedly plotting to blow up the Saudi and Israeli embassies in Washington and to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the United States. This is the same Iran about which Team Obama was still “unclear” as to whether it was pursuing nuclear weapons, the same Persian Shiite country that leftists who pose as Middle East experts constantly swear would never assist an Arab Sunni terrorist network like al-Qaeda.

In November 2011, the International Atomic Energy Agency issued a definitive report saying that Iran was, in fact, actively conducting work “specific” to nuclear arms. Furthermore, the Iranian government put on a four-day “firepower show” earlier that year that showcased new missiles, developed with the help of Russian, Chinese, and North Korean technology, that have a range of 1,200 miles—putting Israel and U.S. allies, forces, and interests in the region easily within striking distance.

And still, Team Obama chased the Iranians—in Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s case, literally. At a gala dinner in Bahrain in 2010, she chased Iranian foreign minister Manouchehr Mottaki around the room, hoping to get a word with him, only to be completely blown off. Clinton told reporters on the plane ride home, “I got up to leave and he was sitting several seats down from me and … he saw me and he stopped and began to turn away. And I said, ‘Hello, Minister!’ And he just turned away.” Denied! But Hillary went back for another insult. While they were both standing outside waiting for their motorcades, Clinton called out to Mottaki again, only to be met by his stony silence, like Sandra Bullock’s giddy stalker character in
All About Steve
.

Obama’s “extended hand” approach was, from the beginning, appeasement. After months of olive branches, bending over backward to accommodate the Iranians, lavishing them with money and other incentives, groveling at them at formal dinners and, apologizing incessantly for big, bad America, Tehran was still moving at breakneck speed to develop nuclear weapons. It got so obvious that even Obama, who had staked so much on his personal ability to get Iran off its nuclear track, had to go along with some financial sanctions. In early August 2011, ninety-two of one hundred senators sent Obama a letter demanding “crippling sanctions” on Iran’s central bank, some of which the administration ultimately imposed.

Throughout the discussion of ramped-up sanctions, the Russians and the Chinese resisted them. Russia is the Costco for radical Islamic regimes, communist states, totalitarian dictatorships, and banana republics. They all go shopping there, buy big, and get great discounts. When Russian president Dmitry Medvedev visited the United States in September 2009 and indicated a possible willingness to support increased sanctions, it was described later by the Russians as Medvedev’s merely being “polite” to Obama, not as a major shift in Russian policy. As Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin put it, “There is no need to frighten the Iranians.”

Without truly regime-ending sanctions, Iran continues its march toward becoming a nuclear-armed terrorist state, unless either the United States or Israel takes some form of military action to foster regime change or at least set the program back, as the Israelis did by bombing Saddam Hussein’s Osirak nuclear facility in 1981 and a suspect nuclear facility in Syria in 2007. Don’t be surprised if Obama approves military action against Iran as we approach the presidential election in order to sow new chaos to make voters forget about his old chaos and to encourage a rallying effect. He is, after all, a Machiavellian Alinskyite. Absent direct military action or the full success of the cloak-and-dagger covert campaign against Iran’s nuke program, however, Tehran will careen headlong to a “breakout” moment with its nuclear program, giving the mullahs—who deny the Holocaust; call for eliminating Israel; support al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, and Hamas; export international terror; and help to kill American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan—the ability to extort and commit mass murder with weapons of mass destruction.

As they worked on nukes, those multitasking Iranian leaders continued to mow down their people. When Obama did finally address the situation, he issued a vague statement to the “Supreme Leader” on the election-results controversy. The United States had been waiting for thirty years for this moment in Iran and the president makes a weak comment essentially supportive of the Supreme Leader who was killing them in the streets? The Iranian protesters must have thought, “What the @$%&! just happened?” If Obama had offered greater moral and even material support to the 2009 Iranian revolution, the ramifications may have been sweeping. If it had succeeded, it would have dealt a major blow to Islamic radicalism and terror. Iran’s nuclear weapons program may have been significantly slowed or even stopped. Terrorist states such as Syria and terrorist organizations such as Hamas and Hezbollah, who lean on Iran for financial and military support, may have been weakened. There may have been a collective sigh of relief in the Sunni Arab world that the Shia mullahs were no longer a threat. In retrospect, Bush perhaps should have moved on Iran rather than Iraq, as some foreign policy observers argued at the time, but when Obama had the opening, he wouldn’t move on Iran either.

In the end, the man who ran on “hope and change” simply couldn’t support those things for the Iranian people.

Obama’s impotence led to an even greater perception in Tehran that America was in terminal decline, and therefore there was no need for the regime to consider Obama’s prostrating offers on their nuclear program or to fear U.S. threats. If the American president couldn’t even muster a “go get ’em” for the Iranian people as they stared down tanks and guns, then he was a paper tiger. Iran slapped away Obama’s hand each time he extended it—including blocking the “virtual” U.S. “embassy” Hillary’s State Department had put online and Obama’s pathetic, repeated attempts to reach out to the Supreme Leader for “talks.” And the paper tiger kept cowering in a cage of its own making.

If there was any positive fallout from the Iranian people’s courage in 2009, it was seen in the millions of Arabs who poured into their streets a year and a half later to demand their own change. In the initial stages of the Arab revolts, the usual rabid anti-Americanism and anti-Israeli sentiment weren’t apparent. Early on, hundreds of thousands of people poured into the streets in Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Jordan, and Lebanon, followed by demonstrations in Syria, Libya, Yemen, Algeria, Bahrain, and even a part of Saudi Arabia.

The most consequential revolt took place in Egypt, the most populous Arab state and the most strategically important. Having seen Tunisia’s longtime dictator overthrown by largely peaceful mass demonstrations, many Egyptians thought they might be able to dislodge their longtime president, Hosni Mubarak. Mubarak had come to power in 1981 following the assassination of his predecessor, Anwar el-Sadat, at the hands of the Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood. Mubarak was rampantly corrupt, abusive, repressive, and tyrannical at home, but abroad he was a pragmatist. He continued Sadat’s policy of peace with Israel, outlawed the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist groups, and maintained a strong alliance with the United States, which rewarded him with over $1.3 billion annually in military and other aid.

So when the crud hit the fan in Egypt on January 25, 2011, and the masses began filling the streets to protest his rule, Mubarak could have reasonably expected that the United States would either back him or stay out of the internal situation completely, as it had with Iran. Instead, Obama saw big crowds of indeterminate nature in the street of Cairo and, within eight days, told Mubarak to scram. Sitting alone, late at night, contemplating the American knife in his back, Mubarak could be heard mumbling, “What the @$%&! just happened?”

Obama, who had publicly dissed Bush’s “freedom agenda” and squashed it in Iran, now attempted to co-opt it by micromanaging Egypt’s revolt. With so much at stake strategically in Egypt, the United States should have been helping to move it toward a government more consistent with our values of political and economic freedom and rule of law as well as respect for those like Israel that embody those values. Instead, Obama took actions that assured a very different kind of outcome in Egypt.

Was Mubarak a dictator? No, said Biden. Yes, according to everyone else in the Obama administration. Should he bug out? Yes, and like “yesterday,” according to Obama’s press secretary, Robert Gibbs. Obama himself said he should consider his “legacy” and “go.” But according to Obama’s own special envoy to Egypt, Ambassador Frank Wisner, he should stay for the sake of stability. Not so fast, according to Secretary Clinton, who suggested that we’d be okay with Mubarak staying in office but allowing Vice President Omar Suleiman to run the show. For how long? Unnamed “senior administration officials” said elections must take place by June 2011, but Clinton said September would be fine. In the middle of a major foreign policy crisis, we didn’t get a president and his team speaking with a single voice. We got a cacophony.

Our other allies in the region, from the Saudis to the Jordanians and the Israelis, watched this tangled diplomatic mess and were frantic with worry and exasperation. If Obama could so easily discard such a key, long-standing ally, might they be next? America’s friendship just got seriously downgraded. And America’s prestige in the Arab world skidded into the dumps. No longer feared, we were also no longer trusted or even liked.

While Team Obama was busy destroying American influence in the region, the crowds in Tahrir Square were kicking it up to the next level. Pro-Mubarak forces emerged on camelback and violent altercations broke out. Nearly a thousand people were killed and scores more injured.

Back in the West, we romanticized the revolt. In its earliest stages, there were some protesters who did truly want greater freedom, more economic opportunity, and better human rights for the Egyptian people. But were they the majority of the protesters? Was that the goal of the organizers? Is that what most Egyptians wanted? These were serious questions, which few people (least of whom the president) bothered to ask at the time. For decades, Mubarak warned that if he were to lose his grip on power, the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamists would seize the levers of power in Egypt. Many foreign policy elites derided that as a false choice that was meant to frighten us into constant support of his regime. And yet, golly gee, it turns out that Mubarak knew Egypt better than they did.

The Egyptian protests began with a small group of organizers meeting in the Cairo apartment of one of their mothers. It included a few student leaders, Wael Ghonim, the Google executive who would mobilize social media to get people into the streets, and two representatives from … the Muslim Brotherhood.

The Brotherhood, or Ikhwan, was founded in Egypt in 1928 and is now the world’s most important and dangerous Islamist organization. It is openly committed to the infiltration and ultimate destruction of the United States, the West, and Israel. Its motto is: “Allah is our objective; the Prophet is our Leader; the Koran is our Law; Jihad is our way; Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope—Allahu Akbar!”

And yet, Team Obama thinks this is a group with whom we can do business. Previous contacts with the Brotherhood had occurred outside U.S. policy, egged on mainly by leftists in the State Department, intelligence communities, and Team Obama. As part of his vaunted policy of “engagement” with our enemies, Obama opened formal contacts with the Brotherhood and sought out its Palestinian terror branch, Hamas. The previous policy of non-engagement with the Brotherhood was meant to prevent a legitimizing of its stealth jihadist agenda and designating its leaders as mainstream. But Team Obama moved to do exactly that.

James Clapper, Obama’s director of national intelligence, testified to Congress that he wasn’t much worried about the Muslim Brotherhood because it was a moderate, “largely secular” organization with “no overarching agenda.” His wildly incorrect assessment of the Brotherhood came just weeks after ABC News’ Diane Sawyer had to inform him of the arrests of twelve terrorism suspects in London, about which Clapper had no clue.

Several months before Clapper’s comments, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Supreme Guide, Mohammed al-Badi, called for waging jihad against the United States: “Arab and Muslim regimes are betraying their people by failing to confront the Muslims’ real enemies, not only Israel but
also the United States. Waging jihad against both of these infidels is a commandment of Allah that cannot be disregarded
.” (Emphasis added.) So much for “renouncing violence.” So much for not targeting the United States. Al-Badi, like the Iranian mullahs, went on to say that America was in irreversible decline and therefore ripe for jihad. In fact, the Brotherhood has always supported the use of violence when it would advance Islamism; it only tactically renounced violence against the Egyptian government because it knew Mubarak would have come down on them like a brick house and because they were advancing the Islamist agenda through the system anyway.

Shortly after Mubarak exited, the Brotherhood brought back to Egypt from exile its foremost jurist, Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi. His return was announced at a massive post-Mubarak rally, at which Ghonim, the young Google guy who had helped to set the revolution in motion, was thanked and promptly escorted off the stage. (This is the same Qaradawi to whom Obama reportedly turned to “mediate” negotiations with the Afghan Taliban. Leave it to Obama to bring together those two crazy kids, the Muslim Brothers and the Taliban!)