Obama Abandoned Reformers In Iran So He Could Make Nuclear Deal
By Hank Berrien
In an explosive charge from Wall Street Journal reporter Jay Solomon in his new book, “The Iran Wars,” in 2009 Barack Obama chose to abandon the green movement, the Iranian reformers who hoped for a regime change that would rid Iran of its brutal Islamic theocratic Islamic regime, because he preferred to make a nuclear deal with the regime.
Instead of supporting movements that would return Iran to a less oppressive state, the kind of action the U.S. took in Hungary in 2000 to train Serbian activists in nonviolent resistance against their dictator, Slobodan Milosevic, or George W. Bush sending James Baker to tell Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze to heed popular protests and step down in 2003 after rigged elections, Solomon writes that Obama ordered the CIA to sever contacts it had with the green movement: “The Agency has contingency plans for supporting democratic uprisings anywhere in the world. This includes providing dissidents with communications, money, and in extreme cases even arms. But in this case the White House ordered it to stand down.”
Obama would never say the election was stolen; instead, he pontificated, “The world is watching and inspired by their participation, regardless of what the ultimate outcome of the election was.”
Solomon notes that Obama ended U.S. programs which documented Iranian human rights abuses, wrote personal letters to Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to reassure him the U.S. would not kick him out, and consistently honored the regime in his statements marking Iran’s annual Nowruz celebration.
Solomon documents how the U.S. gradually capitulated to Iranian demands; starting by demanding Iran dismantle much of its nuclear infrastructure in 2013 but ending in 2015 by agreeing “that Iran would then be allowed to build an industrial-scale nuclear program, with hundreds of thousands of machines, after a ten year period of restraint.”
Solomon concludes, “The Revolutionary Guard continues to develop increasingly sophisticated weapons systems, including ballistic missiles inscribed with threats against Israel on their nose cones. Khamenei and other revolutionary leaders, meanwhile, fine-tune their rhetorical attacks against the United States, seeming to need the American threat to justify their existence.”
