Wednesday Iran Talking Points

from LobeLog: News and Views Relevant to U.S.-Iran relations for December 1st, 2010:

The Washington Post: Jennifer Rubin, in her first day on the job blogging on her new Right Turn blog, interviews former UN ambassador and current American Enterprise Institute fellow John Bolton. Bolton tells her that “Arab states don’t want Iran to have nuclear weapons any more than Israel does, and they fear that Obama is going to deliver them into the hands” of a nuclear-armed Iran.” He considers Obama is “in over his head on national security” and that “unlike every president since FDR, this president doesn’t think foreign policy is a top priority.”

The Wall Street Journal: Former deputy national security adviser and Project for the New American Century signatory Elliot Abrams writes that the double-speak of non-democratic Arab leaders, who “[t]ell the truth to foreigners but not to your own population[s],” is being put to a test by the WikiLeaks releases. “We find the king of Bahrain telling American officials privately that the Iranian nuclear program ‘must be stopped,’ while in public he carefully avoids any comment that might anger Iran’s aggressive leaders,” he writes. Abrams writes that it is easy to criticize the “gap” between the public and private discourse of the United States’ non-democratic Arab allies, but “when we consider the identities of some of the people they fear—the ayatollahs in Tehran, terrorists in Hamas and Hezbollah, al Qaeda itself—we see that the WikiLeaks disclosures are less likely to promote more open government than to give aid and comfort to the enemy.”

The New Republic: Reuel Marc Gerecht, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, writes that the WikiLeaks document dump should prove that those “…who have suggested—or asserted boldly—that Arab leaders don’t want the United States to stop militarily Iran’s nuclear program have been (i) fibbing, (ii) hopelessly ill-informed, or (iii) so ideologically purblind that they now appear intellectually dishonest.” Gerecht concludes by quipping, “They at least owe Mr. Assange a ‘thank you’ for helping them see, as the Quran says, ‘the straight path.’”