Editorial: Iranian move: An affront to US

The Obama administration has been quietly pleased with itself that talking gently to the fresh face in the Iranian presidency, has led what it sees as real progress in taming Tehran’s nuclear weapons ambitions.

Coming after the mercurial and controversial incumbency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the White House has allowed itself to be seduced by the emollient words and altogether better table manners of Hassan Rouhani. Despite warnings from some of his own Democratic legislators as well as senior Republicans, Obama has pressed ahead with his Iranian palling-up policy coupled with the lure of gradual sanctions reductions.

However, just where his generous but naïve policy is really getting him was demonstrated this week. The Iranian government announced that it was appointing as its new ambassador to the United Nations, Hamid Aboutalebi, who played a leading role in the seizure of the US Embassy in Tehran in 1979 and the kidnapping of 52 American diplomats for 444 days.
This is an extraordinary slap in the face of Obama, who clearly believed that he was fast building up a relationship of trust and mutual respect with the Iranian regime.

When Aboutalebi first sets foot on US soil in his new role as his country’s ambassador to the New York-based international organization, he will enjoy full diplomatic immunity. US justice officials will have to watch helplessly, while he moves around New York, enjoying the diplomatic protection that he himself was perfectly prepared to ignore when it came to US diplomats in his own country. It may well be that he will give emollient interviews, saying that his criminal actions as a firebrand student, were all long, long ago. He may well say that international politics have moved on and now Washington and Tehran are on the brink of rapprochement. He may even have the gall to claim that his own appointment is a sign of how well relations between the two countries have recovered.

It can be certain that if any such interviews are given, every decent American will be grinding his teeth. Just because a grievous crime was committed 35 years ago, does not make it any less a crime.

Obama’s people have described Aboutalebi’s nomination as “extremely troubling.” It is not difficult to see that there are two senses to this reaction. The more obvious is the very fact of the new ambassador’s background. Iran has never apologized nor offered compensation for the appalling hostage crisis. Indeed the former US Embassy in Tehran remains a museum to terrorism, which celebrates what the regime insists was the humiliation of the “Great Satan.”
The second reason for the US president to find the situation extremely troubling is that at a stroke, his deep political investment in an Iranian rapprochement, about which he was warned by many, is about to prove entirely worthless. He has been suckered into an impossible position, by Tehran’s adroit “Good Cop,” “Bad Cop” maneuvers. Rouhani was only ever the polite face of a bigoted and unyielding theocratic regime in which the real power lies with Iran’s “supreme leader” Ali Khamenei.

The rule of the clerics is at risk from popular unrest at economic failure. US-led international sanctions, in response to Iran’s undeclared nuclear program, have crippled an economy that was already very poorly managed. Pretending to negotiate to allow proper international inspection of what it is doing — enriching plutonium toward weapons-grade levels — was one way to have sanctions eased. At the Geneva talks, the Obama administration was disposed to be generous, while allowing the French to make the most threatening noises about what would happen if a deal was not cut.

It is his misfortune that he has now been given a clear lesson. Pandering to a regime that still has a policy of malign and extensive meddling in affairs of friendly neighbors, will gain him nothing except ridicule. Obama can no longer ignore the reality that in its substantial support for Syria’s ruthless Assad government, in its calamitous intervention in Iraq and its growing involvement in the west of Afghanistan, Iran remains a rogue state.

The US president now faces a domestic political backlash, as millions of decent Americans recoil at the thought that they may be obliged to make a diplomatically-welcome guest of major crimes against America. Far from ending economic sanctions against Tehran, this piece of cynical effrontery ought to convince Obama that the sanctions should be increased.

Arab News