Is Rouhani right? Iran now poised to become Alpha Dog of Middle East

Iran's President Hassan Rouhani. (Reuters)

Iranian President Rouhani took to Twitter Tuesday with the sobering message that world powers have “surrendered to Iranian nation's will.”

Iran’s leader is referring to the brand new nuclear agreement that was announced in Geneva this week.

But hold on. Is this the same agreement that President Obama and Secretary Kerry say will freeze and then roll back Iran’s nuclear program? The one administration flacks are so excited about that they’re heralding it as a breakthrough equal to Nixon’s opening to China?

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It’s time for a reality check.

The deal with the Persian nation makes it clear we are leaving the region, and leaving Iran in charge.

Iran is now poised to become the Alpha Dog of the Middle East – the dominant economic, military and political power in the region that controls the world’s exported oil.

Thanks to the agreement struck by President Obama’s hand-picked Secretary of State John Kerry, it is doing so with America’s blessing.

The mere suggestion that we will drop sanctions against the country has led the Iranian economy to surge.  Their stock market value has risen by 133% in the last few weeks, and companies previously prevented from doing business with Iran are now lining up to resume trade once sanctions are lifted.

Thanks to the agreement, Iran’s economy will boom. Iran’s coffers will soon be plump enough to resume funding for terrorist groups throughout the region.

Thanks to the agreement, Iran’s nuclear program will continue and its neighbors will treat Iran as a de facto nuclear weapons state.

To be fair Rouhani and Obama seem to have very different interpretations of the Geneva agreement.  But here’s what really matters -- according to the terms of the deal has Iran agreed to give up its nuclear weapons program?  According to Obama, yes. According to Rouhani, no.

Since his presidency began, Rouhani has made clear that Iran desperately wants economic sanctions against his country dropped. But he also made it clear that the country must keep its nuclear program intact.

I personally heard Rouhani say as much when I attended a meeting with him and various foreign policy experts in New York in September.  At that meeting he told us two things:

1. That the Iranian people had elected him to improve economic relations with the United States.

2.  That Iran had the right to master the nuclear fuel cycle.

Looks like the country got both.

Sadly, the Iranian agreement and threats to Congress fits into a larger pattern we have seen from the Obama administration throughout its time in the White House.

Politics is the only thing that counts in the West Wing – winning the next election, getting a bump in the polls, spinning the P.R. machine so the administration looks good right now, no matter what the price that will be paid in the future. 

We have three recent examples, in the foreign policy arena, alone:

1. Secretary Gates’ memoirs reveal that the president and Secretary Clinton opposed President Bush’s Iraq war surge on political grounds. Clinton admitted her opposition to the surge was because she faced Obama in the 2008 Democratic primaries.

Similarly, when faced with his own surge decision, this time on Afghanistan, President Obama went ahead and ordered more troops into combat, despite being “skeptical if not outright convinced it would fail,” according to Gates.  If Obama neither believed in the mission, nor thought it would succeed, he should have taken troops out of Afghanistan, not sent more in more of Americans young people to fight, bleed and die.

2. The recently declassified documents surrounding the 2012 Benghazi attack reveal that the Secretary of Defense and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff were told it was a planned terrorist attack shortly before they headed to the White House to meet with President Obama.

Yet the president’s representatives, within hours, spoke out publicly and lied to the American people.  They blamed the Benghazi attack on a spontaneous reaction to an obscure YouTube video rather than admit that Al Qaeda affiliated terrorists were responsible.

Why? Because it was just three weeks before a presidential election in a campaign where Mr. Obama had touted his decision to issue the order to kill Usama bin Laden and put Al Qaeda on the ropes.

Finally, there’s Iran. The deal with the Persian nation makes it clear we are leaving the region, and leaving Iran in charge.

Here’s my prediction: the agreement with Iran will be hailed as a breakthrough.  But then, so was Neville Chamberlain’s deal with Adolf Hitler in Munich….at least for a little while.