A former aide and trusted confidante of Kerry’s has already gone much further than that and announced that Iranian terrorism is really no big deal at all anymore. Edward Levine, who once worked for both the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, just told the Washington Free Beacon: “This language [of the Senate bill] would mean that, if, say, Hezbollah were to explode a bomb outside a US firm’s office in Beirut, the sanctions would go into effect… even if Iran’s nuclear activities and negotiations were completely in good faith.” I quite admire the use of the word “even” in that sentence. American enterprises in Lebanon can take heart that if their employees get incinerated, it’s to make the world a better place.
It hardly seems likely that Levine is going off-script from what has become a rapprochement-besotted foreign policy establishment, one immune to bad faith, cold water, or Iranian misbehavior. Exquisitely well-timed items now read like joint diplomatic statements between Washington and Tehran. “US and Iran Face Common Enemies in Mideast Strife,” declared a New York Times headline on January 6, citing recent US offers of military aid to the largely Iranian-controlled government in Baghdad for fighting a resurgent al-Qaeda in Anbar Province as a prime example of purportedly convergent national interests. We already knew that Ryan Crocker, who thinks the IRGC only turned anti-American after George W. Bush’s “axis of evil” speech and who wants the US to openly back Assad, was not too long ago offered Robert Ford’s job at the State Department. (He turned it down.) We also know that Obama officials have intimated a new “role” for Iran in the Middle East, from Syria to Afghanistan. Yet the revisionism of Iran’s prior role seems to be approaching the level of an international syndrome. “We face the same enemy, and the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” the Times quoted Mashallah Shamsolvaezin, a “prominent Iranian reformist journalist,” before allowing him to remember Iran’s intelligence sharing with the United States about the Taliban (a favor the US government is now returning by sharing its own intelligence with Iran and Hezbollah about salafis in Lebanon and Syria).
Sensing such a change in stateside atmosphere, where all we have to fear is a bloodthirsty Congress, Iran is now positioning itself not as a state sponsor of terrorism, but instead an imminent partner in the war on terror. The only catch is that terror has to be Sunni in origin. Ancient history, it seems, is the 9/11 Commission Report, which found, inter alia, “[t]here is strong evidence that Iran facilitated the transit of al-Qaeda members into and out of Afghanistan before 9/11, and that some of these were future 9/11 hijackers” and that “[a]fter 9/11, Iran and Hezbollah wished to conceal any past evidence of cooperation with Sunni terrorists associated with al-Qaeda.”
The Kremlin, too, has benefited from Obama’s the-deal-is-an-end-unto-itself monomania by stepping once again into its own favorite role of geopolitical dom to America’s safety-word-deprived sub. Vladimir Putin is trying to sell undisclosed Russian “equipment and goods” to Iran in exchange for 500,000 barrels a day of Iranian oil. As Reuters revealed on January 10, citing an Iranian official, this may happen whether or not the Geneva deal comes to fruition. “Russian purchases of 500,000 bpd of Iranian crude,” journalists Jonathan Saul and Parisa Hafezi wrote, “would lift Iran’s oil exports by 50 percent and provide a major boost to its struggling economy. With current oil prices near $100 a barrel, Iran would earn about an additional $1.5 billion a month.” That’s very interesting because the interim deal is meant to last six months and only free up around $7 billion of sanctioned money. If inked, this sideline arrangement would render either an additional or a supplemental $9 billion to Tehran during that same time period. Is this, then, disruptive of US designs or the global march to disarmament? Don’t be silly. On Monday, a grinning John Kerry handed Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov two potatoes – why, not even BuzzFeed knows. The gift seems fitting given all the spuds Lavrov’s thrown at a receptive Kerry in the past year.
When that great Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz tried to understand moral and intellectual ravages of the 20th century, he came up with a series of ironic couplets intended as the mantras of ideologues. “Let your words speak not through their meanings/But through them against whom they are used,” was but one example. Words from the regimes of Iran, Russia, and Syria mean nothing now because the executive branch is speaking on their behalf. The result is a colossal mission of redefinition. A skeptic is belligerent, a terrorist is a counterterrorist, and an enemy is a friend.
Messianic and obsessive is surely one way to describe this foreign policy.
