Obama Continues Bush's Iran Policy

[Joanne98]

Sunday 21 March 2010

by: Daan de Wit | Deep Journal

Under President Obama, Iran continues to dominate the world agenda. Iran is being presented as a crucial problem that must be solved. The Iran Problem is one with several layers. The uppermost layer is that Iran is a potential threat to world peace. What are the facts and the fiction that make up this first layer?

Critical thinker Noam Chomsky recently made it clear following a reading at the Harvard Memorial Church (23:00) that the foreign policy of President Barack Obama is a continuation of the policy from the second term of his predecessor, President Bush. This pronouncement means that if Bush had served a third term he would have maintained the same foreign policy as Obama - a not unreasonable hypothesis from Chomsky. Chomsky explains (16:45) what this means for the Iranian situation. He cites UN Security Council Resolution 1887, which criticizes Iran and calls on all countries to resolve conflicts within the bounds of the non-proliferation treaty without the threat of force. 'That particular part of the resolution was not exactly headlined here, for a simple reason. It was directed at the two countries that are regularly threatening the use of force: the United States and Israel'.

Words and Deeds Against Iran

Whoever wants to understand what Chomsky means in the concrete sense need only open the newspaper. It looks like old news from the Bush years, but it's actually news from 2010, after a year of Obama and his Nobel Peace Prize. 'We must recruit the whole world to fight Ahmadinejad'. 'Who is Ahmadinejad? A dictator!', according to the Israeli President Shimon Peres, last month. These statements were quickly followed up by Secretary Clinton, who said she feared that Iran was drifting toward a military dictatorship. But it's not limited to words alone. In January it was made known that 'the Pentagon had decided to double the value of emergency military stockpiles it stores in Israel to the value of $800 million'.

http://www.truthout.org/obama-continues-bushs-iran-policy57853

[blm]

1. Which is exactly why I didn't want a hawk as Sec of State advising the Pres. and influencing the

direction and language of the debate.

[theoldman]

2. Bush never spoke to the Iranian people.

He directed all of his rhetoric toward the Iranian leadership. Obama recognizes that the Iranian people are not our enemy. This makes him very different from Bush.