What is it that backed Barack Obama into a corner and compelled him to break his silence!? Was it a late change of conscience, or did the Midterms impose themselves, forcing him to publicly admit to the multiple mistakes he had made in addressing the springs of both Tehran and Damascus?
The hope may well be that his public admission that his administration had fallen short in supporting the Green Movement’s 2009 insurgency - more precisely, it colluded with those whom it had been directed against - could help reduce the scale of losses that Democrats are expected to suffer in the Midterms.
Indeed, these expected losses are a result of the policies pursued by Obama and his team, which returned to the White House after his former vice president Joe Biden won the presidential election, precipitating several moral and political crises in the Middle East since.
It would be difficult to argue that it is better to have made these statements 13 years too late than not to have made them at all because, in politics, there are opportunities that come only once.
Such openings require brave decisions and strong conviction, and they can be seized only by leaders who believe in the causes of peoples and do not exploit them to further their interests as Obama had done with the Green Movement and then again with the revolution of the Syrian people.
A few days ago, the former US president admitted that his administration’s approach of not supporting the 2009 Green Movement protests had been a mistake. “Every time we see a flash, a glimmer of hope, of people longing for freedom, I think we have to point it out. We have to shine a spotlight on it. We have to express some solidarity about it,” he said.
In 2009, Obama dashed the hopes of young Iranian men and women, trading their freedom for his interests with the regime and squandering what had been a genuine opportunity for change.
If it had succeeded or achieved some of its demands, it would have saved the Iranian people and their neighbors many conflicts that were extremely costly in both human and economic terms.
However, the incoming US administration at the time, Obama’s, had decided, from the start, to pursue a new approach in dealing with the Iranian regime totally different from those of previous administrations. In fact, his administration did not only overlook collective Arab security, it also bypassed its traditional allies in the Arab Gulf.
Obama would have done better by having his change of conscience after seeing the images of the Ghouta chemical massacre victims, whom his Special Envoy to Iran Robert Malley traded as part of the nuclear deal, with Obama and his negotiating team believing it sufficient to seize the tools used to perpetrate the crime without holding the perpetrator accountable.
Malley could be trying to do this to the Iranian people once again. He made vague and dubious statements while speaking to CNN recently. “Our policy is not one of regime change instigated from Washington… Our policy is to defend and support the fundamental rights of Iranian citizens, just as we want to support the fundamental rights of citizens across the globe,” he said.
More bizarrely, he added that Washington supports the protests despite the fact that many of them have called for regime change.
Malley speaks as though the Iranian people owe him for something, while the fact is that he has done nothing for them. Indeed, his statements are worrying, and they could be an omen that this administration is more concerned with the stability of the Iranian regime than any of the latter’s allies and that it is ready to overlook the regime’s crimes against its people to ensure that it can go on.
While President Biden was shocked by the recent protests and demanded that the regime stop its violent crackdown, he was not shocked by the use of Iranian drones in the Ukrainian capital Kyiv, which speaks to the depth of the alliance between Moscow and Tehran and to the fact that the latter has become a partner in the war against Biden’s Ukrainian allies.
Nonetheless, the president has zeroed in on the OPEC+ decision, inciting against Riyadh politically despite the fact that OPEC decisions are purely technical and that the organization does not use oil as a weapon.
And so, Obama’s empty pleas that Biden support the protests and stop negotiating with Iran were made to help the latter in the Midterms.
Biden and his team, however, will not end their effort to conclude a deal with Tehran at the expense of the Iranian people and the peoples of the Arab world.
These empty statements on the eve of the Congressional elections are intended to help the Democrats in their contest with the Republicans, especially Donald Trump and his team who managed to turn the question of Iran into a matter of public opinion, nothing more.
