Vol. 79/No. 20 June 1, 2015
It is also worrying the Israeli regime of Benjamin Netanyahu and threatens the decades-long close relationship between Washington and Tel Aviv.
Obama invited the Gulf rulers to join him for meetings in Washington and Camp David, Maryland, May 13-14, aiming to reassure them of the wisdom of his course. But Saudi King Salman announced he wouldn’t attend just days before the meetings. Longtime U.S. ally King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa of Bahrain chose to go to a horse show in Britain and meet with Queen Elizabeth instead. Salman and Hamad sent lower level officials, as did the rulers of the United Arab Emirates and Oman.
The emirs fear Obama’s drive for an accord with Iran will allow Tehran to move closer to developing nuclear weapons. “Whatever the Iranians have, we will have, too,” former Saudi intelligence chief Prince Turki Al-Faisal said April 29.
Representatives of the emirates at the summit pressed Obama to commit the U.S. military to react to any Iranian-backed attack on a Gulf state as an attack on the United States. Obama “stopped short, and wisely so, of offering a formal pact similar to the NATO treaty that some Arab leaders had wanted but that could drag the United States into Middle East conflicts,” the New York Times editorialized May 16.
Obama hopes to cement his historic legacy by forging a working relationship with Tehran and making other foreign policy moves that he anticipates will reduce the threat of war and revolution in the Middle East. His expectation is the Iran deal will advance the ability of more progressive-minded bourgeois leaders there — his meritocratic counterparts — to nudge the Islamic mullahs out of power.
The agreement with Tehran “could lead to more investments in the Iranian economy and more opportunity for the Iranian people, which could strengthen the hands of more moderate leaders,” Obama told London-based Arab language Asharq Al-Awsat.
His course toward a bloc with Iran fits with Obama’s belief that he can forge world peace by finding like-minded “brights” to dialogue with, a view shared by meritocratic academics, nongovernmental organization staffers and other professional layers worldwide.
Washington’s Gulf State allies — Sunni Muslim regimes that compete economically and politically with Tehran and see Iran’s Shia rulers as a deadly threat — sharply disagree.
Henry Kissinger and George Shultz, former secretaries of state, published a critique of Obama’s Iran move in the April 8 Wall Street Journal.
“For the U.S., a decade-long restriction on Iran’s nuclear capacity is a possibly hopeful interlude,” they wrote, pointing to restrictions in the deal on Iran’s nuclear industry. “For Iran’s neighbors — who perceive their imperatives in terms of millennial rivalries — it is a dangerous prelude to an even more dangerous permanent fact of life.” But Kissinger and Shultz don’t offer a significantly different course that would better serve Washington’s interests.
The U.S. rulers claim, incorrectly, that the Shia Muslim-dominated Islamic Republic of Iran represents the 1979 revolution, when popular revolutionary mobilizations of millions of workers and peasants overthrew the U.S.-backed Shah there.
But working people were unable to consolidate their advances by taking political power and establishing a workers and farmers government in Iran.
Instead, Islamist forces pushed aside bourgeois political figures who were not strong enough to rule in their own interests, and carried out a bloody counterrevolution, establishing a Bonapartist regime that has lasted for more than 30 years. The idea they can be “nudged” out of power seems far-fetched.
Russian ‘reset’
Despite continuing conflict in Ukraine, Secretary of State John Kerry visited with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Sochi May 12 to “explore new avenues of collaboration,” the Times reported. The move was seen by Moscow as “an olive branch from President Obama,” the Times said, “and an acknowledgement that Russia and its leader are simply too important to ignore.”Obama is willing to live with Putin’s insistence on a “buffer zone” between Central Europe and the Russian border if it means they can work together to crush Islamic State in Syria. Moscow is a key ally of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who has carried out a murderous war against the toilers of Syria for the last four years that has left more than 200,000 dead and 11 million displaced. While bemoaning Assad’s atrocities, the Obama administration sees stabilizing his regime as the lesser evil in the interests of U.S. imperialism.
“It’s clear that Obama is thinking about his legacy, his place in history,” Alexander Baunov, from the Carnegie Moscow Center, told the Times. “Not to achieve the final deal with Iran will be a big defeat for him, so he needs Russia for this.”
Such a “reset” would be accompanied by lifting the sanctions imposed on Russia after Moscow’s seizure of Crimea last year and support of separatist rebels in eastern Ukraine.
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