Obama and Iran: Good Intentions Are Not Enough

James Phillips / January 20, 2010

The Obama Administration has failed to budge the Islamist dictatorship in Tehran on a wide variety of issues, after one year in office. Iran has made a mockery of the Obama Administration’s engagement effort. It not only has rejected any compromise on the nuclear issue but it stubbornly resists moderating its hostile foreign policy as well. To its dismay, the Obama administration has discovered that apologies and professions of good intentions are not enough to sway the ruthless regime in Tehran.

Iran remains the world’s foremost state sponsor of terrorism and continues to provide arms, training, and financial support to a wide variety of terrorist groups, including Hezbollah, Hamas, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Tehran also supports groups that are killing U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Moreover, Tehran continues to hold Americans as hostages, some of whom it threatens to prosecute as spies. The Iranian government announced on December 14 that it will prosecute three American hikers, who inadvertently strayed over its border with Iraq last spring, on espionage charges which could be punished with the death penalty. New charges also were announced in November against Iranian-American scholar Kian Tajbakhsh, who previously had been sentenced to at least 12 years in prison for “espionage.” Tehran also has stonewalled American efforts to locate Robert Levinson, a former FBI agent who disappeared on a 2007 trip to Iran. (more…)