Let’s start with Jewish opinion in America. When Steven Cohen, a professor at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, conducted a poll of American Jews, including those who, like myself, are not religious, he found that an astounding 63% approved of the nuclear deal, a figure impressively higher right now than American opinion on the subject generally. In other words, with the single exception of J Street, all the major Jewish organizations that are lobbying against the deal and claiming to represent American Jews and Jewish opinion don’t. As Cohen and Todd Gitlin wrote recently in the Washington Post, “Plainly, the idea that American Jews speak as a monolithic bloc needs very early retirement. So does the canard that their commitment to Israel or the views of its prime minister overwhelms their support for Obama and the Iran deal. So does the idea that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu leads, or represents, the world’s Jews.”
So call that a bit of a surprise on “Jewish opinion.” But what about Israel, where support among key figures for deep-sixing the nuclear deal is self-evident? Again, just one small problem: almost any major Israeli figure with a military or intelligence background who is retired or out of government and can speak freely on the matter seems to have come out in favor of the agreement. (The same can be said, by the way, for similar figures in this country, as well as Gary Samore, a former Obama administration White House Coordinator for Arms Control and Weapons of Mass Destruction and until recently head of United Against Nuclear Iran, a Sheldon Adelson-funded group whose job is to knee-cap such an agreement. He stepped down from that post recently to support the nuclear deal.) In Israel, a list as long as your arm of retired intelligence chiefs, generals and admirals, officials of all sorts, even nuclear scientists, have publicly stepped forward to support the agreement, written an open letter to Netanyahu on the subject, and otherwise spoken out, including one ex-head of the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence service, appointed to his position by none other than Netanyahu.
In other words, the well-financed fast and furious campaign here against the nuclear deal (which has left just about every Republican senator, representative, and presidential candidate in full froth) and the near hysteria churned up on the subject has created a reality that bears remarkably little relationship to actual reality. Fortunately, TomDispatch regular David Bromwich is available to offer a cool-eyed look at just what’s behind that version of reality and I’m sure you won’t be shocked to learn that, in the process, one familiar label instantly pops up: neoconservative. Tom
The campaign for the Iraq war of 2003, the purest example of their handiwork, began with a strategy memorandum in 1996, so it is fair to say that they have been pitching to break up the Middle East for a full two decades. But fortune played them a nasty trick with the signing of the nuclear agreement between the P5+1 powers and Iran. War and the prospect of war have been the source of their undeniable importance. If the Iran nuclear deal attains legitimacy, much of their power will slip through their fingers. The imperialist idealism that drives their ventures from day to day will be cheated of the enemy it cannot live without.
Iran might then become just one more unlucky country — authoritarian and cruelly oppressive but an object of persuasion and not the focus of a never-ending threat of force. The neoconservatives are enraged and their response has been feverish: if they were an individual, you would say that he was a danger to himself and others. They still get plenty of attention and airtime, but the main difference between 2003 and 2015 is the absence of a president who obeys them — something that has only served to sharpen their anger.
President Obama defended the nuclear deal vigorously in a recent speech at American University. This was the first such extended explanation of a foreign policy decision in his presidency, and it lacked even an ounce of inspirational fluff. It was, in fact, the first of his utterances not likely to be remembered for its “eloquence,” because it merits the higher praise of good sense. It has been predictably denounced in some quarters as stiff, unkind, ungenerous, and “over the top.”
Obama began by speaking of the ideology that incited and justified the Iraq War of 2003. He called it a “mindset,” and the word was appropriate — suggesting a pair of earphones around a head that prevents us from hearing any penetrating noise from the external world. Starting in the summer of 2002, Americans heard a voice that said: Bomb, invade, occupy Iraq! And do the same to other countries! For the sake of our sanity, Obama explained, we had to take off those earphones:
“We had to end the mindset that got us there in the first place. It was a mindset characterized by a preference for military action over diplomacy; a mindset that put a premium on unilateral U.S. action over the painstaking work of building international consensus; a mindset that exaggerated threats beyond what the intelligence supported. Leaders did not level with the American people about the costs of war, insisting that we could easily impose our will on a part of the world with a profoundly different culture and history. And, of course, those calling for war labeled themselves strong and decisive, while dismissing those who disagreed as weak — even appeasers of a malevolent adversary.”
In this precise catalogue of mental traits, Obama was careful to name no names, but he made it easy to construct a key:
A mindset characterized by a preference for military action: President George W. Bush ordering the U.N. nuclear inspectors out of Iraq (though they had asked to stay and complete their work) because there was a pressing need to bomb in March 2003;
A mindset that put a premium on unilateral U.S. action: Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld dismissing the skeptical challenge and eventual non-participation of France and Germany as proof of the irrelevance of “old Europe”;
A mindset that exaggerated threats: the barely vetted New York Times stories by Judith Miller and Michael Gordon, which an administration bent on war first molded and then cited on TV news shows as evidence to justify preventive war;
Leaders did not level with the American people about the costs of war: Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz pooh-poohing the estimate by Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki that it would take 400,000 troops to maintain order in Iraq after the war;
Insisting that we could easily impose our will on a part of the world with a profoundly different culture and history: the bromides of Bush and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice on the indwelling Arab spirit that yearns for American-style democracy across the Middle East.
Obama went on to assert that there was a continuity of persons as well as ideas between the propagandists who told us to bomb, invade, and occupy Iraq in 2003 and those now spending tens of millions of dollars to ensure that Congress will abort the nuclear deal. “The same mindset,” the president remarked, “in many cases offered by the same people who seem to have no compunction with being repeatedly wrong, led to a war that did more to strengthen Iran, more to isolate the United States, than anything we have done in the decades before or since.”
Those people have never recognized that they were wrong. Some put the blame on President Bush or his viceroy in Baghdad, the administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority, L. Paul Bremer, for mismanaging the occupation that followed the invasion; others continue to nurse the fantastic theory that Saddam Hussein really was in possession of nuclear weapons but somehow smuggled them across the border to Syria and fooled both U.S. reconnaissance teams and the U.N. inspectors; still others maintain that Shiite militias and weaponry dispatched to Iraq from Iran were the chief culprits in the disaster of the postwar insurgency.
Bear in mind that these opinion-makers, in 2003, hardly understood the difference between Shiite and Sunni in the country they wanted to invade. To put the blame now on Iran betrays a genius for circular reasoning. Since all Shia militias are allied by religion with Iran, it can be argued that Iraq was not destroyed by a catastrophic war of choice whose effects set the region on fire. No: the United States under Bush and Cheney was an unpresuming superpower doing its proper work, bringing peace and democracy to one of the dark places of the earth by means of a clean, fast, “surgical” war. In 2004 and 2005, just as in 2015, it was Iran that caused the trouble.
Simple Facts That Are Not Known
Because the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has scorned the nuclear deal without any attention to detail, the president felt compelled in his speech to recognize candidly the difference of national interest that exists between Israel and the United States. Though we are allies, he said, we are two different countries, and he left his listeners to draw the necessary inference: it is not possible for two countries (any more than two persons) to be at once different and the same. Obama went on to connect the nations in question to this premise of international politics:
“I believe [the terms of the agreement] are in America’s interest and Israel’s interest. And as president of the United States, it would be an abrogation of my constitutional duty to act against my best judgment simply because it causes temporary friction with a dear friend and ally.”
The last affirmation is critical. A president takes an oath to “preserve, protect, and defend the constitution of the United States” — that is, to attend to the interest of his own country and not another.
The danger of playing favorites in the world of nations, with a partiality that knows no limits, was a main topic of George Washington’s great Farewell Address. “Permanent, inveterate antipathies against particular nations, and passionate attachments for others, should be excluded,” said Washington, because
“a passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification.”
There are Americans today who submit to a ruling passion that favors uniquely the interests of Israel, and the president had them in mind when he invoked his duties under the Constitution toward the only country whose framework of laws and institutions he had sworn to uphold. Genuine respect for another democracy formed part of his thinking here. Not only was Obama not elected to support Netanyahu’s idea of America’s interest, he was also not elected by Israelis to support his own idea of Israel’s interest.
In a recent commentary in Foreign Affairs, the prominent Israeli journalist and former government adviser Daniel Levy pointed out a fact that is not much remembered today regarding Netanyahu’s continuous effort to sabotage negotiations with Iran. It was the Israeli prime minister who initially demanded that nuclear negotiations be pursued on a separate track from any agreement about the trade or sale of conventional weapons. He chose that path because he was certain it would cause negotiations to collapse. The gambit having failed, he now makes the lifting of sanctions on conventional weaponry a significant objection to the “bad deal” in Vienna.
Obama concluded his argument by saying that “alternatives to military action will have been exhausted if we reject a hard-won diplomatic solution that the world almost unanimously supports. So let’s not mince words. The choice we face is ultimately between diplomacy or some form of war — maybe not tomorrow, maybe not three months from now, but soon.” A measured statement and demonstrably true.
But you would never come within hailing distance of this truth if you listened to the numbers of Congressional Republicans who repeat the neoconservative watchwords and their accompanying digests of the recent history of the Middle East. They run through recitations of the dramatis personae of the war on terror with the alacrity of trained seals. Israel lives in a “dangerous neighborhood.” Islamists are “knocking on our door” and “looking for gaps in the border with Mexico.” Iran is “the foremost state sponsor of terrorism in the world.” Barack Obama is “an appeaser” and “it’s five minutes to midnight in Munich.” Elected officials who walk on two legs in the twenty-first century are not embarrassed to say these things without the slightest idea of their provenance.
If there was a fault in the president’s explanation of his policy, it lay in some things he omitted to say. When you are educating a people who have been proselytized, as Americans have been, by a political cult for the better part of two decades, nothing should be taken for granted. Most Americans do not know that the fanatical Islamists, al-Qaeda, al-Nusra, the Islamic State (IS) — the active and destructive revolutionary force in the greater Middle East at the moment — are called Sunni Muslims. Nor do they know that the Shia Muslims who govern Iran and who support the government of Syria have never attacked the United States.
To say it as simply as it should be said: the Shiites and Sunnis are different sects, and the Shiites of Iran are fighting against the same enemies the U.S. is fighting in Syria and elsewhere. Again, most Americans who get their information from miscellaneous online scraps have no idea that exclusively Sunni fanatics made up the force of hijackers who struck the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. They would be surprised to learn that none of these people came from Iraq or Iran. They do not know that 15 of the 19 came from Saudi Arabia — a supposed ally of the United States. And they do not know that the Islamist warriors who brought chaos and destruction to Syria and Iraq are bankrolled in part by members of the Saudi and Qatari elite who have nothing to do with Iran. It has never been emphasized — it is scarcely written in a way that might be noticeable even in our newspaper of record — that Iran itself has carried the heaviest burden of the fight against IS.
Throughout his presidency, when speaking of Iran, Obama has mixed every expression of hope for improved relations with a measure of opprobrium. He has treated Iran as an exceptional offender against the laws of nations, a country that requires attention only in the cause of disarmament. He does this to assure the policy elite that he respects and can hum the familiar tunes. But this subservience to cliché is timid, unrealistic, and pragmatically ill advised. Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill did not denounce the Soviet Union when they took that country’s dictator, Joseph Stalin, as a partner in war in 1941, though Stalin’s crimes exceeded anything attributable to the Iranian mullahs. Ritual denunciation of a necessary ally is a transparent absurdity. And in a democracy, it prevents ordinary people from arriving at an understanding of what is happening.
Nuclear Deals and Their Critics, Then and Now
What are the odds that the neoconservatives and the Republicans whose policy they manage will succeed in aborting the P5+1 nuclear deal? One can take some encouragement from the last comparably ambitious effort at rapprochement with an enemy: the conversations between President Ronald Reagan and the Soviet head of state Mikhail Gorbachev in Reykjavik, Washington, and Moscow in 1986, 1987, and 1988. At the same time, one ought to be forewarned by the way that unexpected change of course was greeted. The neoconservative cult was just forming then. Some of its early leaders like Richard Perle had positions in the Reagan administration, and they were unanimously hostile to the talks that would yield the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) of 1988. The agreement set out the terms for the destruction of 2,611 missiles, capable of delivering 4,000 warheads — the biggest step in lowering the risk of nuclear war since the Test Ban Treaty championed by President Kennedy and passed in late 1963.
But as James Mann recounted in The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan — a narrative of the anticommunist president’s surprising late turn in foreign policy — all of Reagan’s diplomatic efforts were deeply disapproved at the time, not only by the neoconservative hotheads but by those masters of the “diplomatic breakthrough,” former President Richard Nixon and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger; by the most widely quoted columnists of the right, George Will and William Safire; and by Time magazine, which ran a story titled “Has Reagan Gone Soft?” The Reagan-Gorbachev talks were looked upon with suspicion, too, by “realists” and “moderates” of the political and security establishment, including Robert Gates and then-Vice President George H.W. Bush. Why Gates? Because he was deputy director of the CIA and the Agency was thoroughly convinced that Soviet Russia and its leadership could never change. Why Bush? Because he was already running for president.
The political and media establishment of that moment was startled by the change that President Reagan first signaled in 1986, as startled as today’s establishment has been by the signing of the P5+1 agreement. This was the same Ronald Reagan who in 1983 had called the Soviet Union “an evil empire.” At the end of his visit to Moscow in June 1988, Reagan was asked by the ABC News reporter Sam Donaldson, “Do you still think you’re in an evil empire, Mr. President?”
“No,” Reagan replied. “I was talking about another time and another era.” And he stuck to that answer at a press conference the next day, adding: “I think that a great deal of [the change] is due to the General Secretary, who I have found different than previous Soviet leaders… A large part of it is Mr. Gorbachev as a leader.”
By 1987, Reagan’s popularity had hit a low of 47% — largely because of the Iran-Contra scandal — but he still retained his reputation as the most irreproachable defender of the West against world communism. Obama for his part has done everything he could — short of emulating the invade-and-occupy strategy of Bush — to maintain U.S. force projection in the Middle East in a manner to which Washington has become accustomed since 9/11. He doubtless believes in this policy, and he has surrounded himself with adepts of “humanitarian war”; but he clearly also calculated that a generous ration of conformity would protect him when he tried for his own breakthrough in negotiations with Iran.
In the end, Reagan got a 93-5 vote in the Senate for his nuclear treaty with the Soviet Union. Obama is hoping for much less — a vote of less than two thirds of that body opposed to the Iran settlement. But he is confronted by the full-scale hostility of a Republican party with a new character and with financial backing of a new kind.
The U.S. military and security establishment has sided with the president. And though the fact is little known here, so have the vast majority of Israelis who can speak with any authority on issues of defense and security. Even the president of Israel, Reuven Rivlin, has signaled his belief that Netanyahu’s interventions in American politics are wrong. Former Prime Minister Ehud Barak has advised that, however reluctantly, Israel should accept the nuclear agreement and forge an understanding with the U.S. about what to do in case of its violation. To this remarkable consensus should be added the public letter — signed by 29 American scientists, many of them deeply involved in nuclear issues, including six recipients of the Nobel Prize — which vouches for the stringency of the agreement and praises the “unprecedented” rigor of the 24-day cap on Iranian delays for site inspection: an interval so short (as no one knows better than these scientists) that successful concealment of traces of nuclear activity becomes impossible.
Two other public letters supporting the nuclear deal have been notable. The first was signed by former U.S. diplomats endorsing the agreement unambiguously, among them Ryan Crocker, the American ambassador to Iraq after 2003; Nicholas Burns, who negotiated with Iran for the younger Bush; and Daniel Kurtzer, a former ambassador to Israel and Egypt who served under both President Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. A further letter carried the personal and institutional authority of dozens of retired admirals and generals. So close an approach to unanimity on the benefits of an agreement among the U.S. military, diplomatic, and scientific communities has seldom been achieved. Even President Reagan could not claim this degree of support by qualified judges when he submitted the INF treaty to the Senate.
Such endorsements ought to represent a substantial cause for hope. But Obama’s supporters would be hard pressed to call the contest a draw on television and radio. The neoconservatives — and the Republicans channeling them — are once again working with boundless energy. Careers are being built on this fight, as in the case of Senator Tom Cotton, and more than one presidential candidacy has been staked on it.
On the day of Obama’s speech, even a relatively informed talk show host like Charlie Rose allowed his coverage to slant sharply against the agreement. His four guests were the Haaretz reporter Chemi Shalev; the Daily Beast columnist Jonathan Alter; the former State Department official and president of the Council on Foreign Relations Richard Haass; and the neoconservative venture capitalist, Mark Dubowitz, who has come to be treated as an expert on the nuclear policies and government of Iran.
Haass, passionately opposed to the agreement, said that the president’s speech had been “way over the top,” and hoped Congress would correct its “clear flaws.” Shalev rated the speech honest and “bracing” but thought it would leave many in the Jewish community “offended.” Dubowitz spoke of Iran as a perfidious nation that ought to be subjected to relentless and ever-increasing penalties. His solution: “empower the next president to go back and renegotiate.” Jonathan Alter alone defended the agreement.
Planning to Attack Iran, 2002-2015
By now, the active participants in mainstream commentary on the War on Terror all have a history, and one can learn a good deal by looking back. Haass, for example, a pillar of the foreign policy establishment, worked in the State Department under Bush and Cheney and made no public objection to the Iraq War. Dubowitz has recently co-authored several articles with Reuel Marc Gerecht, a leading propagandist for the 2003 invasion of Iraq. In a characteristic piece in the Wall Street Journal last November, Gerecht and Dubowitz argued that the P5+1 negotiations opened a path to a nuclear bomb for Iran. President Obama, they said, was too weak and trapped by his own errors to explore any alternatives, but there were three “scenarios” that a wiser and stronger president might consider. First, “the White House could give up on diplomacy and preemptively strike Iran’s nuclear sites”; second, “the administration could give up on the current talks and default back to sanctions”; third, “new, even more biting sanctions could be enacted, causing Tehran considerable pain.” The range of advisable policy, for Gerecht and Dubowitz, begins with “crippling sanctions” and ends with a war of aggression.
These scenarios typify the neoconservative “options.” Writing on his own in the Atlantic in June 2013, Dubowitz informed American readers that there was nothing to celebrate in the Iranian presidential election that brought to power the apparently rational and moderate Hassan Rouhani. “A loyalist of Iran’s supreme leader and a master of nuclear deceit,” Rouhani, as interpreted by Dubowitz, is a false friend whose new authority “doesn’t get us any closer to stopping Iran’s nuclear drive.”
Consider Gerecht in his solo flights and you can see what made the president say that these are the people who gave us the Iraq War. They were as sure then about the good that would follow the bombing and invasion of that country as they are now about the benefits of attacking Iran. Indeed, Gerecht has the distinction of having called for an attack on Iran even before the official launch of the Bush strategy on Iraq.
It is said that Dick Cheney’s August 26, 2002, speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars marked the first formal description of the War on Terror offered by a U.S. leader to American citizens. But Gerecht, a former CIA specialist on the Middle East, stole a march on the vice president. In the Weekly Standard of August 6, 2002, under the title “Regime Change in Iran?,” he declared his belief that President Bush was the possessor of a “revolutionary edge and appeal… in the Middle East.” The younger Bush had
“sliced across national borders and civilizational divides with an unqualified assertion of a moral norm. The president declared, ‘The people of Iran want the same freedoms, human rights, and opportunities as people around the world.’ America will stand ‘alongside people everywhere determined to build a world of freedom, dignity, and tolerance.’”
The analyst Gerecht took up where the evangelist Bush left off: the relevant country to attack in August 2002 — on behalf of its people of course — was Iran. Gerecht had no doubt that
“the Iranian people overwhelmingly view clerical rule as fundamentally illegitimate. The heavily Westernized clerics of Iran’s religious establishment — and these mullahs are on both sides of the so-called ‘moderate-conservative’ split — know perfectly well that the Persian word azadi, ‘freedom,’ is perhaps the most evocative word in the language now… Azadi has also become indissolubly associated with the United States.”
This was the way the neoconservatives were already writing and thinking back in August 2002. It is hard to know which is more astounding, the show of philological virtuosity or the self-assurance regarding the advisability of war against a nation of 70 million.
General prognostications, however, are never enough for the neoconservatives, and Gerecht in 2002 enumerated the specific benefits of disorder in Iraq and Iran:
“An American invasion [of Iraq] could possibly provoke riots in Iran — simultaneous uprisings in major cities that would simply be beyond the scope of regime-loyal specialized riot-control units. The army or the Revolutionary Guard Corps would have to be pulled into service in large numbers, and that’s when things could get interesting.”
That was how he had it scored. Bush, the voice of freedom, would be adored as a benevolent emperor at a distance:
“President Bush, of course, doesn’t need National Iranian Television broadcasts to beam his message into the Islamic Republic. Everything he says moves at light speed through the country. The president just needs to keep talking about freedom being the birthright of Muslim peoples.”
Such was the neoconservative recipe for democracy in the Middle East: beam the words of George W. Bush to people everywhere, invade Iraq, and spark a democratic uprising in Iran (assisted if necessary by U.S. bombs and soldiers).
For a final glimpse of the same “mindset,” look closely at Gerecht’s advice on Syria in June 2014. Writing again in the Weekly Standard, he deprecated the very idea of getting help from Iran in the fight against the Islamic State. “The Enemy of My Enemy Is My Enemy” declares the title of the piece, and the article makes the same point with a minimal reliance on facts. Sunni terrorists are portrayed as impetuous youngsters who naturally go too far, but it is too early to gauge their trajectory: the changes they bring may not ultimately be uncongenial to American interest. The Shiite masterminds of Iran, on the other hand, have long ago attained full maturity and will never change. Gerecht’s hope, last summer, was that substantial Iranian casualties in a war against IS would lead to the spontaneous uprising that failed to materialize in 2003.
“It is possible that the present Sunni-Shiite conflict could, if the Iranian body count rises and too much national treasure is spent, produce shock waves that fundamentally weaken the clerical regime… Things could get violent inside the Islamic Republic.”
The vision underlying this policy amounts to selective or strategic tolerance of al-Qaeda and IS for the sake of destroying Iran.
Will the War on Terror Be Debated?
How can such opinions be contested in American politics? The answer will have to come from what remains of the potential opposition party in the war on terror. Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut has been a remarkable exception, but for the most part the Democrats are preoccupied with domestic policy. If almost two-thirds of Congress today is poised to vote against the Iran settlement, this embarrassment is the result of years of systematic neglect. Sherrod Brown, Elizabeth Warren, Dick Durbin, Ron Wyden, Tammy Baldwin, and a few others have the talent to lead an opposition to a pursuit of the war on terror on the neoconservative plan, but to have any effect they would have to speak up regularly on foreign policy.
Meanwhile, the Republican Party and its billionaire bankrollers are playing the long game on Iran. They would like to gain the two-thirds majority to override Obama’s veto of a Congressional vote against the nuclear agreement, but they do not really expect that to happen. The survival of any agreement, however, depends not only on its approval but on its legitimation. Their hope is to depress public support for the P5+1 deal so much that the next president and members of the next Congress would require extraordinary courage to persist with American participation.
In the Foreign Affairs column mentioned earlier, Daniel Levy concluded that the long game is also Benjamin Netanyahu’s strategy:
”Netanyahu is going for a twofer — if he loses on the veto-proof super majority in Congress, he can still succeed in keeping the Iran deal politically controversial and fragile and prevent any further détente with Iran. The hope, in this case, is that the next U.S. administration can resume the status quo ante in January 2017.”
What we are seeing, then, is not simply a concentrated effort that will end with the vote by the Senate in September on the P5+1 nuclear deal. It is the earliest phase of a lobbying campaign intended to usher in a Republican president of appropriate views in January 2017.
One may recognize that the money is there for such a long-term drive and yet still wonder at the virulence of the campaign to destroy Iran. What exactly allows the war party to keep on as they do? Within Israel, the cause is a political theology that obliges its believers to fight preemptive wars without any end in sight in order to guard against enemies who have opposed the existence of the Jewish state ever since its creation. This is a defensive fear that responds to an irrefutable historical reality. The neoconservatives and the better informed among their Republican followers are harder to grasp — harder anyway until you realize that, for them, we are Rome and the Republican Party is the cradle of future American emperors, praetors, and proconsuls.
“Ideology,” as the political essayist and Czech dissident Vaclav Havel once wrote, is “the bridge of excuses” a government offers to the people it rules. Between 2001 and 2009, the U.S. government was run by neoconservatives; they had a fair shot and the public judgment went against them; but in a climate of resurgent confusion about the Middle East, they have come a long way toward rebuilding their bridge. They are zealots but also prudent careerists, and the combination of money and revived propaganda may succeed in blurring many unhappy memories. Nor can they be accused of insincerity. When a theorist at a neoconservative think tank, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies or the American Enterprise Institute, affirms that democracy is what the Iranian people will have as soon as the U.S. cripples the resources of that country, he surely believes what he is saying. The projection seems as true to them now as it was in 2002, 2007, and 2010, as true as it will be in 2017 when a new president, preferably another young man of “spirit” like George W. Bush, succeeds the weak and deplorable Barack Obama. For such people, the battle is never over, and there is always another war ahead. They will push until they are stopped.
David Bromwich, a TomDispatch regular, teaches literature at Yale University and is the author of Moral Imagination.
Voir également:
This may be the most surprising of President Obama’s foreign-policy legacies: not just that he presided over a humanitarian and cultural disaster of epochal proportions, but that he soothed the American people into feeling no responsibility for the tragedy.
Starvation in Biafra a generation ago sparked a movement. Synagogues and churches a decade ago mobilized to relieve misery in Darfur. When the Taliban in 2001 destroyed ancient statues of Buddha at Bamiyan, the world was appalled at the lost heritage.
Today the Islamic State is blowing up precious cultural monuments in Palmyra, and half of all Syrians have been displaced — as if, on a proportional basis, 160 million Americans had been made homeless. More than a quarter-million have been killed. Yet the “Save Darfur” signs have not given way to “Save Syria.”
One reason is that Obama — who ran for president on the promise of restoring the United States’ moral stature — has constantly reassured Americans that doing nothing is the smart and moral policy. He has argued, at times, that there was nothing the United States could do, belittling the Syrian opposition as “former doctors, farmers, pharmacists and so forth.”
He has argued that we would only make things worse — “I am more mindful probably than most,” he told the New Republic in 2013, “of not only our incredible strengths and capabilities, but also our limitations.”
He has implied that because we can’t solve every problem, maybe we shouldn’t solve any. “How do I weigh tens of thousands who’ve been killed in Syria versus the tens of thousands who are currently being killed in the Congo?” he asked (though at the time thousands were not being killed in Congo).
On those rare occasions when political pressure or the horrors of Syrian suffering threatened to overwhelm any excuse for inaction, he promised action, in statements or White House leaks: training for the opposition, a safe zone on the Turkish border. Once public attention moved on, the plans were abandoned or scaled back to meaningless proportions (training 50 soldiers per year, no action on the Turkish border).
Perversely, the worse Syria became, the more justified the president seemed for staying aloof; steps that might have helped in 2012 seemed ineffectual by 2013, and actions that could have saved lives in 2013 would not have been up to the challenge presented by 2014. The fact that the woman who wrote the book on genocide, Samantha Power, and the woman who campaigned to bomb Sudan to save the people of Darfur, Susan Rice, could apparently in good conscience stay on as U.N. ambassador and national security adviser, respectively, lent further moral credibility to U.S. abdication.
Most critically, inaction was sold not as a necessary evil but as a notable achievement: The United States at last was leading with the head, not the heart, and with modesty, not arrogance. “Realists” pointed out that the United States gets into trouble when it lets ideals or emotions rule — when it sends soldiers to feed the hungry in Somalia, for example, only to lose them, as told in “ Black Hawk Down,” and turn tail.
The realists were right that the United States has to consider interests as well as values, must pace itself and can’t save everyone. But a values-free argument ought at least to be able to show that the ends have justified the means, whereas the strategic results of Obama’s disengagement have been nearly as disastrous as the human consequences.
When Obama pulled all U.S. troops out of Iraq, critics worried there would be instability; none envisioned the emergence of a full-blown terrorist state. When he announced in August 2011 that “the time has come for President Assad to step aside,” critics worried the words might prove empty — but few imagined the extent of the catastrophe: not just the savagery of chemical weapons and “barrel bombs,” but also the Islamic State’s recruitment of thousands of foreign fighters, its spread from Libya to Afghanistan, the danger to the U.S. homeland that has alarmed U.S. intelligence officials, the refugees destabilizing Europe.
Even had Obama’s policy succeeded in purely realist terms, though, something would have been lost in the anesthetization of U.S. opinion. Yes, the nation’s outrage over the decades has been uneven, at times hypocritical, at times self-serving.
But there also has been something to be admired in America’s determination to help — to ask, even if we cannot save everyone in Congo, can we not save some people in Syria? Obama’s successful turning of that question on its head is nothing to be proud of.
Voir de plus:
Pour laisser à tout prix une trace dans l’histoire, le président des États-Unis fait le pari risqué qu’un régime théocratique, brutal et obscurantiste peut changer de nature.
Après avoir soulevé tant d’espoirs, souvent irrationnels, lors de son entrée à la Maison Blanche et tant déçu par son dilettantisme et sa soumission aux intérêts, Barack Obama a retrouvé une grande ambition: laisser une trace dans l’histoire en brisant les tabous de la politique étrangère américaine. Il a renoué des relations avec Cuba et l’accord sur le nucléaire iranien qu’il a présenté à la télévision aux Américains mardi 14 juillet apparait comme son grand dessein. Il en a fait une affaire personnelle et aura mis six ans à construire un changement d’alliance majeur au Moyen-Orient.
Effacer une succession d’échecs diplomatiques
Il a maintenant fait de l’Iran la puissance régionale sur laquelle les États-Unis veulent s’appuyer. Il aura pour cela réussi, non sans mal, à réduire l’influence d’Israël et de l’Arabie Saoudite à Washington et aura tourné le dos à l’Égypte comme à la Turquie. L’alliance de l’administration Obama avec l’Iran est en fait une réalité sur le terrain depuis des mois dans les guerres que mènent Téhéran et ses alliés chiites en Irak, en Syrie et au Yémen. Des officiers américains coordonnent étroitement les interventions de l’aviation américaine et des forces spéciales en Irak et en Syrie avec les commandants des Gardiens de la révolution iranien pour contenir et repousser Daech. Washington n’a également cessé de freiner les livraisons d’armes et l’entraînement des rebelles syriens pour ménager Bachar el-Assad et le Hezbollah libanais, les alliés de l’Iran. Au 3 juillet, le Pentagone formait… 60 combattants syriens , un programme de 500 millions de dollars!
Mais pour obtenir une grande victoire diplomatique, Barack Obama prend des risques considérables. Il n’a pas fait preuve jusqu’à aujourd’hui d’une grande habileté géopolitique. Il a même multiplié les échecs: avec les printemps arabes, qu’il a soutenus avec enthousiasme sans en mesurer les conséquences, avec la Russie de Poutine, avec qui il voulait repartir sur de nouvelles bases –le fameux «reset»–, sans parler de la Chine, dont il a sans cesse sous-estimé les ambitions impérialistes et militaires. Pour finir, il porte une responsabilité importante dans la montée en puissance de Daech pour avoir abandonné les sunnites en Irak comme en Syrie aux mains de leurs ennemis et les avoir jetés ainsi dans les bras de leurs pires extrémistes. La fameuse ligne rouge qu’il entendait imposer à Bachar el-Assad sur l’utilisation des armes chimiques est aujourd’hui bien oubliée.
L’enjeu, c’est la prolifération de l’arme nucléaire et des missiles balistiques au Moyen-Orient
Avec la République islamique d’Iran, une nouvelle erreur pourrait être encore plus lourde de conséquences. Car l’enjeu, c’est la prolifération de l’arme nucléaire et des missiles balistiques au Moyen-Orient, la région la plus instable de la planète, et c’est offrir son plus grand succès depuis des décennies et la guerre Iran-Irak à un régime, celui des mollahs de Téhéran, dont l’idéologie n’est pas très éloignée de celle de Daech.
La capacité de résistance de la société iranienne, sa volonté de liberté, de modernité, de changement notamment parmi la jeunesse qui s’exprime sans cesse en dépit de l’oppression qu’elle subit depuis plus de trente-cinq ans, peut justifier le pari d’Obama sur l’ouverture du régime. Mais il vient juste de le renforcer politiquement et plus encore économiquement en lui donnant soudain accès à près de 150 milliards de dollars d’avoirs bloqués et en lui permettant d’exporter plus de pétrole et d’importer presque tout ce qu’il souhaite, y compris bientôt des armes. L’embargo de l’ONU sur les exportations d’armes vers l’Iran sera levé après 5 ans, c’est dans l’accord.
L’art de la tromperie
Dans son désir de signer un accord à tout prix, quitte à revenir encore sur bon nombre de lignes rouges qu’il avait lui-même fixées, comme la capacité de l’Iran à continuer à enrichir l’uranium ou la possibilité de mener des inspections surprises à tout moment, Barack Obama a fait un pari dangereux. Et il ne sera plus à la Maison Blanche si l’Iran recrée par la force un empire perse. L’accord est bancal, déséquilibré. Il laisse l’ensemble des installations nucléaires iraniennes intactes, des milliers de centrifugeuses et des centaines de kilos d’uranium enrichi, sans véritables contrôles et sans réelle possibilité de revenir en arrière sur les sanctions économiques, qui avaient prouvé leur efficacité. Elles avaient asphyxié l’économie iranienne et fini ainsi par menacer le régime. Les sanctions économiques et les menaces d’une intervention militaire étaient en fait efficaces car elle étaient parvenues jusqu’à aujourd’hui à empêcher l’Iran de se doter de l’arme nucléaire. Si l’Iran n’a pas franchi le pas tout en en ayant la capacité «depuis au moins une décennie», c’est par crainte des conséquences, notamment militaires, explique Gary Sick, grand spécialiste de l’Iran, ancien conseiller des présidents américains Ford, Carter et Reagan.
Barack Obama mise tout sur la bonne volonté d’un régime théocratique, brutal et obscurantiste qui se maintient au pouvoir par une répression impitoyable des opposants. Selon Amnesty International, 743 personnes ont été exécutées en Iran en 2014.
Obama laisse l’ensemble des installations nucléaires iraniennes intactes
L’accord part du principe que la République islamique respectera ses engagements. Comme si le passé ne servait pas de leçon et n’existait pas. Il est pourtant très lourd… Car Téhéran a menti sur les installations d’enrichissement de Natanz, a menti sur le réacteur au plutonium d’Arak, a menti à la Russie, à l’Allemagne et à la France quand il a annoncé il y a une décennie qu’il suspendait l’enrichissement d’uranium, a menti en permanence aux inspecteurs de l’AIEA (Agence internationale de l’énergie atomique) sur à peu près tout –du nombre de centrifugeuses à la quantité d’uranium enrichi à Fordo– et, plus important, a menti au monde entier en expliquant qu’il ne cherchait pas à se doter de l’arme nucléaire.
Et la République islamique sait dissimuler. Elle en a fait un art. Elle a construit Arak et Natanz sans que personne ne s’en rende compte (c’est l’opposition iranienne qui a révélé l’existence de ces installations secrètes). Elle a construit une seconde génération de centrifugeuses sans que personne ne s’en rende compte. Elle a produit de l’uranium fortement enrichi à Fordo sans que personne ne s’en rende compte et elle a construit des missiles capables de porter une tête nucléaire à Parchin sans que personne ne s’en rende compte.
Des inspections surprises annoncées à l’avance!
L’Iran a menti dans le passé, dans le présent et le fera dans l’avenir. Comment peut-on en être si sûr? C’est inscrit dans les conditions de l’accord. Pourquoi les Iraniens ont toujours rejeté, et ont obtenu gain de cause, les conditions permettant de vraies inspections des sites nucléaires s’ils n’ont rien à dissimuler? Les puissances ont accepté la règle ridicule «d’un accès organisé». Les inspecteurs ne pourront se rendre sur les sites qu’en prévenant vingt-quatre jours à l’avance et sans avoir un accès libre aux installations. On peut prendre le pari que les inspections ne trouveront jamais rien.
Quand à la menace d’un éventuel retour des sanctions, le fameux «snap back» tant vanté à Washington et à Paris, il est à peu près impossible à mettre en oeuvre. Il faudrait d’abord que l’Iran soit pris en flagrant délit de tricherie. Si c’est le cas, un processus de négociation doit être engagé qui peut durer jusqu’à deux mois et demi. Si le problème n’est pas réglé, il faudra alors un vote du Conseil de sécurité de l’ONU sans veto de la Russie et de la Chine pour remettre en place les sanctions. Autant dire qu’elles ne seront jamais réinstallées.
La menace d’un éventuel retour des sanctions est vide
La logique de Téhéran est pourtant assez simple. Imposer la République islamique, qui se considère comme assiégée, et ses alliés chiites libanais, syriens et yéménites comme la puissance hégémonique de la région. Quand vous êtes engagé dans une guerre sainte, le mensonge et la tromperie ne sont pas des péchés, mais des moyens.
Quand le ministre des Affaires étrangères iranien, Mohammed Zarif, a été interviewé à la télévision américaine par le célèbre Charlie Rose et a déclaré sans sourciller que «l’Iran n’a jamais appelé à la destruction d’Israël», il mentait. Tout le monde le savait. L’Iran a appelé des centaines de fois à la destruction d’Israël à commencer par le Guide suprême, l’ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Mais si personne ne veut relever les mensonges, il n’y a plus de mensonges… Cela ressemble à un monde orwellien. Et cela permettra à Obama de laisser à la postérité la «paix» avec l’Iran, à John Kerry, le secrétaire d’État américain, d’avoir son prix Nobel et à l’Iran d’avoir la bombe un peu plus tard… sans prendre le moindre risque. L’accord prévoit la levée de toute restriction sur l’enrichissement d’uranium dans huit ans!
Voir enfin:
Le changement climatique a-t-il eu un impact sur la guerre civile qui ravage la Syrie depuis maintenant quatre ans? C’est la thèse que défendent cinq chercheurs dans une étude publiée dans la revue Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, lundi 2 mars.
L’un des auteurs, Colin Kelley, explique à Quartz qu’il s’est intéressé au sujet après une série d’articles publiés en 2012 par l’éditorialiste Thomas Friedman dans le New York Times. «Les tensions autour des terres, de l’eau et de la nourriture nous disent quelque chose: le Printemps arabe n’a pas seulement été provoqué par des tensions politiques et économiques mais aussi, de manière moins visible, par des tensions environnementales, climatiques et démographiques», écrivait par exemple Friedman en avril 2012.
Dans le résumé de leur étude, les chercheurs expliquent que la région du Croissant fertile a expérimenté, entre 2006 et 2009, la pire sécheresse jamais enregistrée dans la zone, ce qui a provoqué un effondrement des récoltes, une hausse des prix alimentaires, le déplacement d’environ 1,5 million de personnes des campagnes vers les centres urbains, des déscolarisations massives… Bref, cette sécheresse, rendue, selon leurs calculs, deux à trois fois plus probable par l’action humaine sur l’environnement, a «catalysé» les problèmes du pays ou renforcé «des vulnérabilités qui existaient déjà», selon une formule de Colin Kelley à CBS News. Elle aurait agi, pour reprendre les mots du département de la Défense américain dans un rapport publié en novembre 2014, en «multiplicateur de menaces» dans les années précédant la guerre civile, qui a éclaté en mars 2011 après des manifestations violemment réprimées par le pouvoir.
Evidemment, il ne faut pas établir de relation causale directe et unilatérale entre les deux phénomènes.
Comme l’explique le New York Times, «les chercheurs estiment que beaucoup de facteurs ont contribué au chaos […] et qu’il est impossible de quantifier les effets d’un événement donné, comme la sécheresse».
Comme le résume le météorologue David Titley à Slate.com, «cela ne veut pas dire que vous pouviez prédire l’Etat islamique à partir de cela, juste que cela plantait le décor pour qu’arrive quelque chose de vraiment négatif».
Le changement de conditions climatiques passe d’ailleurs lui-même par un filtre politique, puisque Quartz souligne que ses conséquences ont été rendues pire que dans les pays voisins par «des décennies de mauvaises politiques agricoles», notamment impulsées par le père de Bachar el-Assad, Hafez el-Assad.
Le New York Times rappelle que de précédentes études faisant le lien entre changement climatique et conflits ont été critiquées par d’autres chercheurs, comme le Suisse Thomas Bernauer, qui affirme que les conclusions de cette nouvelle étude «sont très hypothétiques et ne sont pas soutenues par des preuves scientifiques robustes». Richard Seager, un des coauteurs, en reconnaît d’ailleurs les limites potentielles dans une interview au National Geographic:
«Pour la critiquer, il suffit à quelqu’un de dire que tout ceci se serait produit sans la sécheresse. Et il est possible que cela soit vrai: ce régime était avant tout immensément impopulaire.»
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SECRETARY KERRY: Shaarik, thank you very much for the introduction. Thanks for your leadership, and assalamu alaikum to all of you. Thank you, and also a late Eid Mubarak. I will tell you I’ve been having lots of phone conversations with your foreign ministers or your prime ministers or one official or another who have been at the Haaj as they’re talking to me, and they found time in between to be able to have a conversation, and I was very grateful for that. And I hope those of you who had a chance to partake in that found it as rewarding and as personal as it is supposed to be. It’s a pleasure to be able to welcome everybody here, and it’s really a pleasure for us in the State Department to have a chance to be able to celebrate Eid-al-Adha, even though we’re late – and that’s because of my schedule.
I was just in Cairo, as you know, where a terrific $5.4 billion was raised in order to help rebuild Gaza, and we could not have emphasized more times how critical it is not to rebuild it so it is destroyed again. It is imperative that we find a way to get back to the negotiations for what everybody knows is, in the end, the only way to go forward that makes sense. And the alternative is in so many ways difficult.
But what we’re trying to do here in the State Department – and Shaarik is a part of that mosaic that we’re putting together here. We have the first faith-based office; we have the office reaching out to the Islamic world. And when he started drafting our national strategic approach as a leader of a faith community, he began that strategy with two words: “religion matters.” And he’s made it his mission to reach out to faith communities to solve global problems, whether it’s been at the White House or at the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security, and I couldn’t be more pleased that he has joined our efforts here at the State Department as the Special Representative to Muslim Communities.
I’ve often said to people that if I went back to college today, I would at least minor, if not major, in comparative religion – and a lot of other things that I didn’t major in, I might add – because I have found in my journeys through the world over these 29-plus years as a senator and now in the year and a half, year and three-quarters I’ve been Secretary of State, there is no place in the world where in one way or the other it isn’t affecting an outlook. And even in places where people are nonbelievers or people have a different philosophy rather than one of the major religions of the world, there are themes and currents that run through every life philosophy, every single approach, whether it’s Native Americanism or Confucianism or – you can find that there’s been this passage through history from the scriptures – from the Qu’ran, from the Torah, from the Bible – that all come together, and even from other places, where they’ve been incorporated and inculcated through the sermons and preachings and teachings of religious leaders. And we know this today.
So tonight, what we’re really doing as we celebrate late but nevertheless celebrate Eid al-Adha, is that we are celebrating sort of the meaning and importance of sacrifice and devotion in our lives. And, of course, the Jewish religion just went through its holiest moment of the year with Yom Kippur, which is also a moment of huge introspection and re-evaluation. Eid al-Adha is a special time for charity and compassion and for prayer and reflection. And during this period of time, as you all know, you’ll find everybody practicing it in their own way wherever it is that they are in the world. Young girl somewhere in New Delhi praying outside of a mosque, or kids or adults in Pakistan, girls singing songs and painting their hands with henna, or Shiites in the holy city of Najaf or fellow Shi’a celebrating Eid-e-Ghorban in Iran. They’re all these derivatives that all come the very same thing. And that’s the spirit of Eid. And in a sense, this is a moment that really shares with us a common sense at an important time about the sense of possibilities that we’re looking at in the world today.
So we all know – I look around, I see a lot of very familiar faces here, and I thank so many members of our diplomatic corps for being here with us today – this is a difficult time. It’s a very complex time, and there are many currents that are loose out there that have brought us to this moment. The extremism that we see, the radical exploitation of religion which is translated into violence, has no basis in any of the real religions. There’s nothing Islamic about what ISIL/Daesh stands for or is doing to people.
And so we all have a larger mission here. And obviously, history is filled with that. I mean, you go back to the Thirty Years’ War in Europe and other periods of time, Protestants, Catholics, others who have fought. It’s not new to us. Tragically, it’s more prominent because media is more available today, the messaging is there, everybody is more aware on an instantaneous basis of what is happening. And of course it’s exploited by people who engage in this.
So – but it’s still complicated, and for other reasons. We’re living at a point in time where there are just more young people demanding what they see the rest of the world having than at any time in modern history. And when you have 65 percent of a country, as you do in many countries in the Middle East or South Central Asia or elsewhere, in north Horn of Africa, that are under the age of 35 – 65 percent – and 60 percent under the age of 30, and 50 percent under the age of 25, you are going to have a governance problem unless your governance is really addressing the demands and needs of that part of the population. And I don’t care who you are or what kind of government you have, nobody is impregnable with respect to those demands and those needs, and they have to be responded to at some point in time.
Don’t forget that what is happening now in Syria started with young people going out and demonstrating for jobs and for opportunity and for dignity and respect. And when they were met by clubs and repression, their parents went out to defend them. They joined in and said, “No, don’t do this to our kids. We want this.” And then they were met with bullets. And that’s what has brought this incredible, chaotic moment where we now have 10 million people or so displaced – a million and a half in Lebanon, million and a half in Turkey, a million and a half-plus or more in Jordan – and internally, huge population displaced. And Eid actually speaks to that, because this is a moment of charity. This is a moment when Ibrahim is celebrated for not slaying – for being willing to slay his son in order to provide for people and to prove something.
And so we have to stop and think about that in the context of this challenge that we face today. I think that it is more critical than ever that we be fighting for peace, and I think it is more necessary than ever. As I went around and met with people in the course of our discussions about the ISIL coalition, the truth is we – there wasn’t a leader I met with in the region who didn’t raise with me spontaneously the need to try to get peace between Israel and the Palestinians, because it was a cause of recruitment and of street anger and agitation that they felt – and I see a lot of heads nodding – they had to respond to. And people need to understand the connection of that. And it has something to do with humiliation and denial and absence of dignity, and Eid celebrates the opposite of all of that.
So what we need to do is recognize that we need to build peace through specific partnerships. One partnership is specifically the effort to try to drive towards this peace, to have a compromise, to find a way to create two states that can live together side by side, two peoples, with both of their aspirations being respected. I still believe that’s possible, and I still believe we need to work towards it. We also need to figure out how – and I think what’s happening in Iraq is an interesting beginning of that, where Daesh has kind of drawn a line and made people stop and think, and Sunni and Shia are beginning to realize there’s a common problem out there and there is a way to try to work together. And the new government gives a breath of fresh air to that possibility that that could happen.
In addition to that, we remember that lots of countries are making sacrifices in the spirit of Eid-al-Adha right now with respect to the refugees that they’re taking in, with respect to the emergency food programs they’re engaged in, the emergency aid. So this is really a moment to reflect deeply on how we will deal not just with the manifestation of the symptom, which is what the violence and the extremism is, but with the underlying causes which go to this question of governance and corruption and a whole issue of how you meet the needs of people.
And that’s where our partnership has to be not just for peace but for prosperity, shared prosperity, where everybody has an ability to be able to find a job, get the education, be able to reach the brass ring, and it is not just reserved for a privileged few.
And finally, we have to build a partnership for sustainability of the planet itself, and that brings us to something like climate change, which is profoundly having an impact in various parts of the world, where droughts are occurring not at a 100-year level but at a 500-year level in places that they haven’t occurred, floods of massive proportions, diminishment of water for crops and agriculture at a time where we need to be talking about sustainable food.
So I think this is an important moment, and that’s why we’ve launched a lot of different initiatives like the Malaysia initiative, the Beehive Initiative at the Global Entrepreneurship Summit. And that’s why I’m going to Jakarta day after tomorrow to be there for the inauguration of a man who was elected president in the world’s biggest Muslim-majority country, in large part because of his commitment to good, honest governance. And that’s why we’re engaging in private sector efforts to help the young Syrian refugees. And in many places we see the desert increasingly creeping into East Africa. We’re seeing herders and farmers pushed into deadly conflict as a result. We’re seeing the Himalayan glaciers receding, which will affect the water that is critical to rice and to other agriculture on both sides of the Himalayas. These are our challenges.
So it’s a good moment to come together. I’ve talked longer than I meant to. Shaarik is going to have the chance to say a few words. I need to run to another meeting, which I hope you will forgive me for doing. But I just hope that the meaning of this moment can over this next year, by all of us in a cooperative and respectful way, mutual respect, without anybody asserting that they have a better way or a better answer, but listening to each other, that we can work together in a good spirit to be able to address these concerns. The world is looking to all of us. We are the leaders. We have this opportunity in this moment to try to make a difference. And it is imperative that every single one of us make every effort to listen to each other, to do everything in our power to be able to have an impact. And I’m confident that in the days ahead we can.
I just spent a number of hours in negotiations. I was with Lavrov talking about what we can do to change things between Russia and the United States, with Foreign Minister Zarif of Iran, where have a very tough negotiation that affects a lot of you in this room. And believe me, we are mindful of that, and we will continue to work, however, to try to find a fair and thoughtful way that achieves all of our goals. And I think we can look with pride at a young Muslim girl, the youngest ever recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, who’s shown such courage in her effort to try to fight for rights and to stand up and improve a lot of other people. And that’s part of what we should reflect on as we think about the meaning of this particular celebration.
So I really thank you for coming tonight. I wish I could stay and talk through the evening. It would be much nicer than the meeting I have to go to. (Laughter.) But I can’t and so, again, Eid Mubarak belatedly, and I wish all of you well as we work together going forward. Thank you all, and God bless. Thank you very, very much. (Applause.)