The following is an excerpt from OpinionJournal.com’s “Best of the Web” written by the editor, James Taranto.
The Administration Courts Iran
Robert Gates, defense secretary of the Great Satan, “said Tuesday that so far, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s response to the US outreach has been ‘not very encouraging,’ ” reports the Associated Press. Well, there’s a shocker.
But elsewhere in the region, the AP reports, the Obama administration’s efforts to make nice with Tehran’s lunatic regime do seem to be having an effect, sending “ripples of alarm through the capitals of America’s closest Arab allies, who accuse Teheran of playing a destabilizing role in the Middle East”:
The concerns being raised by Arab leaders sound strikingly like those coming from the mouths of Israeli officials.
“We hope that any dialogue between countries will not come at our expense,” said a statement Tuesday by the six oil-rich nations of the Gulf Cooperation Council, who have long relied on US protection in the region. . . .
The London-based Palestinian daily, Al-Quds Al-Arabi even said the Arab moderates governments were actively working on building an alliance with Israel to counter Iranian influence in the region.
The Wednesday report, citing Palestinian officials, said Egyptian and Jordanian diplomats were working to amend the 2002 Arab peace initiative to make it more acceptable to Israel.
The report could not be independently confirmed.
Commentary’s Jennifer Rubin sees this as evidence of Washington’s fecklessness:
Since the Obama administration is all about listening, maybe they should listen to the emerging consensus in the Middle East. The problem, everyone seems to agree, is not Israel but Iran. And they can talk for a while, but the patience of all those who would fall, as Shimon Peres said, under the “dark cloud” of Iran’s nuclear threat, is limited.
Rubin may well be right; certainly this column shares her concern about the administration’s get-soft policy on Tehran. It strikes us, however, that the reported Arab discomfort is a benefit of the policy.
The notion that Israel is the obstacle to peace in the Middle East is either malicious or fatuous; the problem always has been Arab intransigence. The U.S. is, in effect, threatening to betray its allies, Israeli and Arab, by making a deal with Iran. This is an empty threat so long as the Iranian rulers maintain their posture of criminal insanity, which precludes any deal with the Great Satan.
But if the threat worries Arab regimes enough to force them to be reasonable vis-à-vis Israel, that would seem to be a boon for everyone except the Iranian regime. Does this mean there’s a method to Obama’s madness? Probably not. Occam’s razor points to incompetence and naiveté as a more likely explanation than benign Machiavellianism. But sometimes bad policies have unintended good consequences.
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