A Hard Landing — Dr. Mackubin Owens
Dr. Mackubin Owens, MINDSETTER™
A Hard Landing — Dr. Mackubin Owens
As president, Raisi violently suppressed the protests that have periodically erupted in the country, the most recent of which involved the 2022 death of Mahsa Amini, a woman who had been earlier detained for not wearing a hijab. The months-long security crackdown that followed the demonstrations killed more than 500 people and saw over 22,000 detained. Apparently, the many Iranians and members of the Iranian diaspora who took to social media to celebrate Raisi’s “hard landing” did not agree with the adage misattributed to Twain. For the record, I don’t agree either.
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One wonders what these Iranians thought of the moral bankruptcy of the of the United Nations, which flew its flag at half-mast to honor him, or the US State Department, which issued a statement expressing the official condolences of the United States “for the death of Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, Foreign Minister Amir-Abdollahian, and other members of their delegation in a helicopter crash in northwest Iran.” Although White House spokesman John Kirby downplayed the expression of condolences as “a typical practice,” I am not aware of any such statement in May of 1945 expressing our “condolences to the German people for the death of Adolph Hitler.” The administration could have at least taken its bearings from the statement of President G.H.W. Bush in response to the death of Khomeni: “The official Iranian news agency has confirmed the death of the Ayatollah Khomeini. With his passing, we hope Iran will now move toward assuming a responsible role in the international community.”
The fact is that Raisi was a moral monster who personified the evil nature of the Iranian regime. Although he is hardly in the class of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, or Pol Pot, it was not from lack of trying. But the US response is a reflection of a policy that goes back to Obama, who seemed to believe that the key to peace in the Middle East was to appease Iran, which it did to the detriment of our allies in the region, especially Israel.
In 2015, the Obama administration helped negotiate the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), known colloquially as the Iran Nuclear Agreement, which its sponsors claimed would curb Iran’s development of a nuclear weapon. Opponents criticized the JCPOA for its concessions to Iran and its lack of means to inspect various sites and verify compliance. Even the tens of billions of dollars that flowed into Iranian coffers did not curb Iranian aggression: the mullahs continue to fund and support terrorism by Hamas and Hezbollah and create chaos throughout the region. Perhaps the nadir of US policy toward Iran was Barack Obama’s cold-blooded betrayal of the 2009 Green Revolutionaries because of his overriding objective to secure the JCPOA, a deal, sold to the public with optimistic falsehoods, that looks worse each day.
Iran now enriches uranium at nearly weapons-grade levels and hampers international inspections. Tehran has armed Russia in its war on Ukraine. It coordinated Hamas’ attack on Israel and then launched a massive drone-and-missile attack on Israel amid its war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip. It continues to arm proxy groups in the Mideast, like Yemen’s Houthi rebels and Lebanon’s Hezbollah.
As I argued in an earlier piece for GoLocalProv, (“Statesmanship 101: Distinguishing Between Friends and Enemies” 26 October, 2022), a fundamental principle of statesmanship and foreign policy is to understand the difference between friends and allies on the one hand and enemies and competitors on the other. In the Middle East, Iran is our implacable enemy. Israel is our ally. Our partners, actual and potential, around the globe are watching how the United States is treating friends and allies in the Middle East. As the White House persists in penalizing our allies there, countries the world over are no doubt reassessing their own relationship to America.