President Donald Trump ought to make Barack Obama the new U.S. ambassador to Iran.
Or at least offer him the job. It would be a first.
While a handful of U.S. ambassadors have gone on to become president, the last being George H.W. Bush (ambassador to the UN and China), no ex-president has ever become an ambassador.
It would give Obama something to do. It would also be Trump’s way of sticking it to Obama, who has accused Trump of “bullying” his way to a peace deal with Iran.
Others might argue that it was a lot of Trump bullying, along with a lot of Trump bombing, that brought the remaining Iranian leaders, or what was left of them, to agree to his terms.
If Obama turned the offer down, as expected, Trump could then offer Obama wingman John Kerry the job, sticking it to him, too.
It was Kerry, as Obama’s Secretary of State, who negotiated Obama’s giveaway 2015 JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) deal with the Iranian mullahs that allegedly curbed — but not ended — Iran’s quest to obtain a nuclear weapon.
To get the deal done, Obama in 2015 lifted sanctions against Iran and signed off on the release to Iran of $150 billion in frozen Iranian assets, which the Iranians used to work on their nuclear bomb program, build ballistic missiles, and fund their terrorist proxies Hamas and Hezbollah.
In 2016, the ever-amenable Obama, rather than demand the release of four Americans held hostage, paid the Iranians $1.7 billion in cash for their release.
The pallets of cash, made up of U.S. dollars, Swiss francs and Euros, were flown to Tehran at night aboard an unmarked plane to the delight of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard (IRGC).
The appointment of Obama is a joke, of course, but it does go to show how the Iranians took Obama, Kerry (and hapless Joe Biden) to the cleaners.
Which it is why it is so ludicrous and self-serving for Obama to maintain that the agreement Trump is working out with the Iranians is like his JCPOA agreement.
“It is doubtful that any agreement that arises is going to be significantly different or a significant improvement from the deal that we had in the first place and had worked, for a long stretch of time before we, the United States [Trump] pulled out of it,” Obama has said.
Obama added, “It’s a reminder that a lot of different foreign policy problems, the notion we can just bully our way or bomb our way to solutions may sometimes seem appealing, but the fact of the matter is that taking time to explore diplomacy can avoid war.”
Obama, in other words, was content with kicking the can down the road
The fact of the matter is that, thanks to Obama and his notion that he could buy off Iran, led to Iran tottering on the edge of creating several nuclear bombs it promised to use on Israel and the United States.
While Obama and other presidents talked about how Iran, a nation led by apocalypse-believing Islamist zealots, should never have nuclear weapons, Trump is the only president who did something about it.
And he did so without sending in planeloads of cash — at least not yet.
Iran will not have nuclear weapons as long as Trump is around, and hopefully long after he is gone.
He made this happen not by flying in pallets of cash to bribe the Iranians to play nice, but by flying in bombers to batter them so they would play by his terms.
The devil is in the details of the deal, of course. But Iran will not have a nuke it vowed to use to blow up the place. Trump did the world a big favor.
Veteran political reporter Peter Lucas can be reached at: [email protected]