Did Israel Intentionally Subvert Obama's Iran Message?
Yesterday when the New York Times inexplicably gave Shimon Peres' threatening and insulting message to Iran equal play with President Obama;s, I thought it might be no coincidence.
Peres, who is an uberhawk on Iran, suddenly sends "greetings" to the Iran people urging them to rise up against their government at the same moment that Obama respectfully addressed the "Islamic Republic of Iran" with the most conciliatory US message in decades. Coincidence? Maybe.
Also, new AIPAC video promoting upcoming conference.
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I hope you're right that the White House is furious, though it's just as likely that claiming to be outraged is just another example of good cop bad cop.
I'll wait to hear Dennis Ross, Hilary Clinton, Joe Biden, or even Obama say how disappointed they are.
Even more humorously, I'll wait for the reports of Rahm Emmanual at a strategy meeting saying, "Shimon Peres, DEAD!" while jabbing a knife into the table for dramatic effect, like he used to do when he was furious with those who crossed him.
It's more likely we'll see Obama greet their new foreign minister with a big hug than it is that we'll here somebody go on record with their disappointment in Israel. At least with words stronger than "unhelpful."
I hope the White House is furious, though, and thanks for covering this.
March 21, 2009 10:39 AM | Reply | Permalink
I understand they are pissed.
In any case, Obama's overture is what matters. You know: the dogs bark but the caravan moves on.
March 21, 2009 1:42 PM | Reply | Permalink
I still want to learn more about the status of the dirty war on Iran, whether the U.S. has stopped their part in it, and whether Obama will call out Israel on it. I'll even settle for "unhelpful."
A pretty speech in the midst of a dirty war would be no more than a symbolic overture, agreed?
Here's Seymour Hersh in a TPMTV clip of a CNN interview, the gist of which you're all familiar with:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7942G_x-So
He said that top Democrats in Congress approved $400 million for the Bush Admin. to wage dirty war on Iran. I'm guessing Feinstein, Pelosi, Harman, and hopefully not Rahm.
Hersh is also coming out with a new book describing Cheney's rogue hit squad, and I suspect that the Iranian dirty war and the Cheney hit squad are connected.
Obama coming out against the dirty war in Iran would mean not only confronting Israel in unprecedented fashion, but also his fellow Democratic Congressional leaders, and possibly his own Chief of Staff and Secretary of State.
March 21, 2009 1:58 PM | Reply | Permalink
I'll rephrase part of that. I'd be willing to BET that Cheney's hit squad and the Democratic funded dirty war in Iran are connected.
I wonder if they are still inside Iran, who they are reporting to (Cheney, Obama, Feinstein?), and whether Obama is officially a war criminal yet.
March 21, 2009 2:09 PM | Reply | Permalink
Change we can believe in?
March 21, 2009 11:03 AM | Reply | Permalink
Let's see some objectivity regarding the ROI and the SOI. The strong brew of sovereign state rights defended by Israel, is similar to that cited by Iran against intervention. Both are states defending people with histories of victimization.
Iran and Iraq are areas with a great deal of historical invasion traffic with cycles of victimization experienced by most factions represented. Western foreign policy fears these regimes more. Iran and Iraq have been, until more recently, the Yin and Yang of the other in terms of Shiite-Sunni and Sunni-Shiite dominance-submission. Yet both factions have histories of suffering at the others' hand. Distrust remains.
Israel has an historically recent experience of unprecedented industrial scale genocide against its people. In that history, Nazi exploitation of Arab resentment toward the Jews adds yet more menace to the distrust of threat felt in Israel regarding Iran/Iraq. Israel has legitimate concerns about the fact that both major religious-political identities in Iraq/Iran carry on with this resentment beneath many minarets of influence.
March 21, 2009 12:45 PM | Reply | Permalink
In short, we continue to see the wary eye of experience and the PTSD of the double-cross moving within factions throughout the Middle East.
March 21, 2009 12:47 PM | Reply | Permalink
Something I would like to see Rosenberg address is what role countries that protect Christian majorities within their borders should play between the ethnic-ideological enmities seen between the SOI and the Muslim world.
March 21, 2009 12:59 PM | Reply | Permalink
You could write about that role, make your point, and have the rest of us read it as a bounty.
March 21, 2009 1:25 PM | Reply | Permalink
It was simply a "no sale":Iran's Ayatollah Dismisses Outreach From Obama,
says there is no change in US policy
Khamenei: 'He Insulted The Islamic Republic Of Iran From The First Day'
by ALI AKBAR DAREINI, AP News on TPM's feed
Mar 21, 2009 10:42 EST
Do you always plan to find someone else to blame when something Obama tries doesn't work out the way he planned? Just askin'.
I sort of expected this when I went to IRNA's site (the Iranian state news agency) after your post on the message and didn't see it mentioned. They didn't have anything on it at all.
And it wasn't just because it was a holiday, because they had plenty of other news being posted. I went through the entire 6 pages of news posts back to March 19. They didn't have anything on news on Israel. Why do you think it's always about Israel?
This is what they did have in news possibly related to the U.S. Sorry I can't put the links to the full articles because of the spam filter:
Maybe you don't realize it, but apparently they don't like us in Afghanistan/Pakistan, where Obama intends to ramp up presence, and they don't like us in Iraq, where Obama plans to leave a presence. And they don't like our attitude about them at the U.N. and about nuclear intentions, and Obama has said it's a high priority to prevent them from having the bomb. And so far it doesn't seem like the Russians are going to be too helpful to Obama about much of that. I would think all of those things have at least as much to do with their attitude towards the U.S. as Israel does. I doubt taking Israel off our client state list while leaving all those other things would change much at all about the ruling ayatollah's attitude towards the U.S.
March 21, 2009 3:06 PM | Reply | Permalink
oh, I forgot maybe the most important thing: holiday feliciations to a country probably shouldn't be expected to be taken too warmly when you have an embargo against that country and still have all of their assets in the U.S. under seizure.
March 21, 2009 3:30 PM | Reply | Permalink
I don't thonk Obama expected an immediate response. He knows what the Iranians want and he is not prepared to give right now.
It was a first step.
It was designed to say, hey, you aren't dealing with Bush anymore.
I don't know that the mullahs will respond positively but all but the most bitter partisans are giving the President due credit for it.
All but the most bitter and disappointed partisans.
March 21, 2009 4:00 PM | Reply | Permalink
Obama did get an immediate response from Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei -- a one-day turnaround is pretty fast -- and it wasn't the rejection that the media (and artappraiser) are depicting it as. As I suggest in a separate post, it was along the lines of: OK, back up those pretty words with some concrete steps. And the very explicit offer: "If you change your behavior, we'll change ours."
It's clear Peres went out of his way to dilute and obscure Obama's message -- sabotage is the correct word -- but his rather pathetic screed didn't work. Obama's initiative is on track.
March 21, 2009 6:17 PM | Reply | Permalink
All we know so far is what the official reaction is, and the state propaganda organ's story lineup. That's not necessarily the same thing as Iranian public reaction. It can be seen, in fact, as the mullah's attempt to tamp down any overt positive reaction by their own pubic, which doesn't have the same kind of organized media to use, in any case.
What's the situation in Iran with regard to access to open media? Is the internet open there, or is is censored a la China? How would we know how much of Obama's message actually got through? And how would we know what the taxi driver in Tehran thought about it?
March 22, 2009 8:28 AM | Reply | Permalink
Iran has one of the fastest growing internet user bases in the world. And access to satellite broadcasts are commonplace. The Iranian people aren't rubes and arent going to rush out and topple their regime because Obama made a pretty speech. The Iranian government has legitimate roots and mass popularity, despite what the US media claims. And the Iranian people know their history quite well and resent foreign interference in their affairs.
March 23, 2009 10:29 AM | Reply | Permalink
Obama is showing the open hand in the leas up to the Iranian elections. I think this is in no way an appeal to (sp?) achmadinijad, this is a direct appeal to influence the outcome of the upcoming election. Strong international play, very stong. If this is on the nets and can be accessed , I think there are more people in Iran looking for peaceful coecistance than bloddy jihad.
March 22, 2009 3:58 AM | Reply | Permalink
Nonsense. It was precisely US meddling in Iranian politics that got Ahmadinejad elected. The people of Iran resent foreign interference in their affairs. They're not rubes.
March 23, 2009 10:23 AM | Reply | Permalink
Gibbs does not sound particularly furious to me. I wish he did, and I also wish I knew the experts who dared to actual suggest the "potential to dilute the effect" of Peres' message and why they are not being quoted in their own names. The chilling effect of the Chas Freeman brouhaha perhaps? If only Dennis Ross would have been subject to the same scrutiny!
I've been monitoring this saga as it unfolds, and have very little doubt that Shimon Peres' subversion of Obama's Nowruz message was as deliberate as it was destructive. It is also obvious that Peres' surprise address to Iranians to overthrow their elected leaders while blessing them for the new year was no sooner done than said.
It's remarkable how fast AP (which seems to have its own hawkish foreign policy towards Iran--its version of the Obama Nowruz video was interspersed with footage of ground to air missiles taking off and scenes of Khamenei and Ahmadinjad) got the Peres story, and how quickly so many US news sources, including the NY Times, Forbes, were both able and all too willing to lump Obama's video message with that of Peres! Ron Kampeas of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency actually made Peres' Nowruz broadcast the main subject of the article and Obama's video greeting the also-ran.
More about my take on this in my TPM blog....
March 22, 2009 11:30 AM | Reply | Permalink
if obama could not stand up for freeman, why should we pretend he is being sincere here?
wouldnt a strong defense and backing of freeman in his original position have rested the case?
maybe he is pissed at peres and israel for backstabbing him.
but who believes he will do anything about it?, if its even true.....
March 22, 2009 1:49 PM | Reply | Permalink
Why are you surprised. The biggest threat that Iran poses to Israel is that Iran and the US may start to get along... and then, who needs Israel any more? Remember, before Nixon went to China, he kicked Taiwan to the curb. The pro-Taiwanese lobby was not able to prevent that. The Pro-Israeli lobby doesn't want to see Israel in the same position as Taiwan. So, they'll do everything they can to prevent a US-Iran rapprochement.
March 23, 2009 10:22 AM | Reply | Permalink
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