Obama's mixed record on Iran

It's not possible to be "pro-Israel" without a serious policy against Iran.

By SAUL SINGER
Ahmadinejad wave 298.88 (photo credit: )
Ahmadinejad wave 298.88
(photo credit: )
I agree with Alon Pinkas that the rumor campaign against Barack Obama is unfair. He is not a Muslim, nor is there anything in his voting record or statements to suggest that he is anti-Israel. He is, from what I can tell, well within the "pro-Israel" mainstream of the Democratic party today. The problem is more with the narrowness of the definition of "pro-Israel," as that label is normally used. The truth is that a candidate's voting record and position paper on Israel (here's Obama's) tells the voter little about what the presidency of that candidate would mean for Israel, or for the US, for that matter. There are two reasons for this. First, thank goodness, the position papers of candidates and Members of Congress are now so uniformly pro-Israel, regardless of party (with some exceptions) that it is almost impossible to distinguish between them. Second and more importantly, what matters most for Israel right now is not a candidate's stance on foreign assistance or the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, or even more controversial issues such as settlements and targeted killings of terrorists. Much more significant is the candidate's position on the wider threat of radical Islamism and its potential nuclear epicenter, Iran. Here Obama's record is mixed. On the one hand, he has co-sponsored a bill to impose further sanctions on Iran, and has spoken out on the seriousness of the Iranian threat. On the other, while he supported the sanctions that the Administration eventually imposed on the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, he opposed the amendment that Hillary Clinton voted for because, "it tied our presence in Iraq to an effort to counter the Iranian threat, which he felt could 1) give a green light to premature military action against Iran, and 2) provide a rationale to keep our troops in Iraq, when of course, he believes we need to end our presence there," as his staff explained to me in an email. In other words, Obama placed the risk of a US military response to Iran and the risk of lengthening the US stay in Iraq as higher and more important than the risk that international sanctions will be too weak to stop Iran from becoming a nuclear power. Such logic is warped and mistaken. It also reveals Obama's talk about sanctions and the need to stop Iran as lip service, rather than a serious, thought-through policy designed to succeed. It is all well and good to be for sanctions, but if this position melts away in the face of extremely tenuous excuses based on extraneous issues, than the "tough" position on Iran is meaningless. It is not possible to be "pro-Israel" without a serious policy for preventing Iran from becoming a nuclear power, because a nuclear Iran - besides threatening Israel directly - would substantially ramp up its support for all the forces that are arrayed against Israel and the US: Hamas, Hizbullah, and al-Qaida. Iran is the primary foreign policy challenge not just for Israel, but for the United States. The presidential candidates need to be measured first and foremost by the seriousness and coherence of their prescriptions on this issue. By this measure, all the major Democrats are currently fairing worse than all the major Republicans, but this could change as the campaign moves toward the general election.