“If Iran has a nuclear weapon, it’s my name on this,” then-President Barack Obama vowed in 2015. Whether or not Iran gets the bomb remains to be seen, but the largest slaughter of Jewish civilians since the Holocaust is very much part of Obama’s legacy. That massacre and the war that has followed are inescapably linked to policies pursued by both Obama and his Democratic successor.
For Israel, the war against Hamas and other Iranian-backed terrorist groups is a war of necessity. On Oct. 7, Hamas and its allies invaded the Jewish state, murdering more than 1,200 Israelis. The details that have emerged bear comparison with the most savage events in all of human history.
THE MIDDLE KINGDOM MEETS THE MIDDLE EAST
Hamas burned children alive, shot babies in car seats and cribs, tied up parents and tortured them in front of their children, gouged out their eyes, cut off their feet, fingers, and hands. Women were raped on the corpses of their dead friends before being executed. The elderly were set on fire in their own homes.
The terrorists were proud of their butchery. Many livestreamed their murders. Some used their victims’ phones to upload their barbarism, sending footage of murdered loved ones to their family members. One 94-year-old grandmother watched her granddaughter being raped and murdered. “I want it to stop replaying in my head,” she cried.
One terrorist, using the phone of a dead Israeli woman whom he had just murdered, called his parents: “Dad, I killed 10 Jews with my own hands! Please be proud of me, Dad.” He promised to send footage to his parents over WhatsApp.
Israel’s casualties were multitudes greater, proportionally, than what the United States experienced on 9/11. To ensure that it never happens again, Israel, which spent the last decade-plus waging limited campaigns against Hamas, is now compelled to destroy the terrorist group. For the Jewish state, Oct. 7 changed everything.
Israel’s war of necessity is the direct result of choices made by its ally, the U.S. Two different administrations made fateful decisions with results both tragic and predictable.
Sometimes, the outcomes of policies are merely a matter of common sense. When you print excess money, you get inflation. When you declare war on the police, you get more crime. And when you give a bunch of money to the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism, you get more terrorism. It was the policy of both the Obama administration and President Joe Biden's administration to fund and appease Iran. Many people have died, and more will die, as a result.
The architects of this Middle East disaster seem unaware of the monster they helped create. Worse, some have offered false equivocations and excuses. What they have not done is take responsibility for their failures.
Speaking on Pod Save America, a podcast run by former Obama aides Tommy Vietor and Jon Favreau, Obama said, “You have to admit that nobody’s hands are clean, that all of us are complicit to some degree.” He added that “what Hamas did was horrific, and there’s no justification for it.” But then he went on to justify it, saying, “What is also true is that the occupation and what’s happening to Palestinians is unbearable.”
The former president was trying to explain away the mass murder of Jewish civilians for which he, by empowering Iran and its subsidiaries such as Hamas, bears considerable responsibility. Where Obama offers patronizing lectures, he should engage in self-reflection and apologize.
Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip in 2005. Gazans then elected Hamas, a U.S.-designated terrorist group whose charter quotes Adolf Hitler and calls for a genocide of Jews. Hamas has used Gaza, where not a single Jew lives — so much for the so-called occupation — to launch attacks on the Jewish state ever since. What is more, Palestinian terrorists have been murdering Jews since the 1920s, more than two decades before Israel was re-created in 1948.
In addition, Hamas and other Iranian proxies view all of Israel to be an “occupation.” The word, then, is not about Israelis being in Gaza but about Israelis being in Israel. It is genocidal.
Obama’s actions after Oct. 7 were revealing. The former president waited more than three days after the massacre to comment and finally offered a “suggested reading list” for his followers. Among his suggestions? A New York Review of Books article by former aide Ben Rhodes, who helped create a media “echo chamber” to sell the Iran nuclear deal. In his commentary, Rhodes unironically attributed the massacre to a “military wing of Hamas, a faction that has proven to be the worst version of itself.”
Hamas and its patron in Tehran bear the brunt of blame for the Oct. 7 massacre and the war that has followed. But by empowering and enabling the Islamist tyrants, Obama is more complicit than most.
He entered office seeking rapprochement with the Islamic Republic of Iran, the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism. Ostensibly, the 44th president wanted to contain its illegal nuclear weapons program. But as Middle East scholars Tony Badran and Mike Doran have convincingly argued, the president was really after something different: a realignment of the U.S. alliance system in the region — away from Israel and the Gulf and toward the mullahs in Iran.
Tehran has been a thorn in America’s side since the 1979 revolution when Islamists under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini seized power and took Americans hostage. The ethos of the regime is virulently anti-American and antisemitic. From its inception, the Islamic Republic plotted terror attacks against both the U.S. and Israel.
Washington tried different approaches, including a “dual containment” policy toward Iran and its rival, Iraq, during the Clinton administration. Tensions between the U.S. and Iran increased during the early 2000s, with Tehran actively fueling a global jihad against the West. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and its charismatic commander Qassem Soleimani armed and trained terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Obama entered office with a different approach from his predecessors. In his 2009 inauguration speech, the president told the mullahs that he would “extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.” It would prove to be an ill-fated initiative.
Obama's plans rested on the false assumption that Iran's grievances were legitimate, predicated, in part, on Western colonialism and Cold War-era mistakes. This was a theme of his 2009 speech in Cairo, which was dubbed by critics as part of an "apology tour." Given at the beginning of his presidency, the address was heralded as setting a new course for American Middle East policy. In a harbinger of what was to come, Obama tossed aside any pretense of modesty, proclaiming that he had “come here to Cairo to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world.”
But he was more than a starry-eyed academic. Indeed, Obama and top aides such as Rhodes fancied themselves to be the second coming of Henry Kissinger, Richard Nixon, and realpolitik. Reaching out to Iran, they asserted, would be like Nixon reaching an accord with communist China in the 1970s.
Importantly, Obama and many of his top aides viewed the region through a sectarian lens. The past decade had seen the U.S. at war with Sunni jihadi groups, such as al Qaeda. By cozying up to the Shiite Islamic Republic, the administration hoped to find “balance” in the region. This overlooked two key facts: Iran is an imperialistic and revisionist power that seeks regional dominance. And it has long supported jihadis, Sunni and Shiite alike, to achieve this goal.
For Obama, Iran’s systemic human rights abuses were but an inconvenience, a hurdle to achieving understanding with a foe. The solution was to turn a blind eye.
In 2009, Iranians took to the streets to protest their government in what came to be known as the Green Movement. Instead of seizing on it and undermining the mullahs but abandoning his planned rapprochement, Obama and his White House issued only muted responses to their repression.
Later, in another concession, the Obama administration failed to intervene to prevent Syrian dictator Bashar Assad, a key Iranian ally, from slaughtering his own people in the country’s civil war. The rapprochement with Tehran so thoroughly distorted American policy that when the administration was compelled belatedly to fight the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, it even partnered with forces that Tehran would find acceptable, including a Kurdish terrorist group, the Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK, and various Iranian militias — among them some that have been launching attacks on American forces in the months and weeks before and after Oct. 7.
Obama completely failed to understand the Iranian regime’s raison d'etre. The mullahs, he thought, could be reasoned with. Their antisemitism was for domestic consumption. They didn’t really mean it. He said as much in a 2015 interview with the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg. Having established this alternative to reality, an understanding could be reached.
The Obama administration hailed the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, better known as the Iran nuclear deal, as the crowning achievement of his second term. Yet, instead of preventing Tehran from acquiring nuclear weapons, the terms of the deal, with its sunset clauses and weak verification regime, ensured that Iran could acquire nuclear weapons. As Doran and others have noted, the Iran deal was about resetting U.S. policy in the Middle East. And Iran would be handsomely rewarded.
Investigations into drug networks run by Hezbollah, the Iranian proxy that rules Lebanon, were quashed. The regime was given airplane pallets of cash in exchange for hostages. Sanctions relief was instituted, allowing Iran’s coffers to overflow.
There were warnings that appeasement wouldn’t work and Tehran would spend its new power and wealth on terror.
In sworn testimony on June 10, 2015, Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, who had served as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency under Obama, told a joint hearing of the House Foreign Affairs and Armed Services committees that “Iran’s stated desire to destroy Israel is very real.” Flynn and others, Democrats among them, warned that funds Iran would get from the nuclear deal would likely be used for terrorism.
Iran’s behavior indicated as much. In 2011, the mullahs approved a plot to murder a Saudi diplomat on U.S. soil by blowing up a Washington, D.C., restaurant. The regime continued to finance and support terrorist groups, such as Hamas, Hezbollah, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, that were committed to Israel’s destruction. The Obama administration actively resisted attempts to address “non-nuclear” concerns, including Iran’s terror nexus and missile development, as part of any prospective deal.
In January 2016, Iran took 10 American sailors hostage, broadcasting footage of them on their knees with their hands up. American deterrence had so completely collapsed that then-Secretary of State John Kerry even thanked Iran for returning the hostages and hailed the incident as proof that the administration’s appeasement policy was working. Under Obama, America's humiliation abroad was accounted a success.
The Trump administration dropped Obama’s policy of feting Iran, leaving the nuclear deal after a lengthy policy review. The new White House team worked to shore up relations with traditional allies in the Gulf, as well as Israel. A stringent sanctions regime was enacted to curtail Tehran’s ability to finance terror. When Iranian proxies attacked a U.S. base in the Middle East and killed an American, then-President Donald Trump ordered a strike that killed the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps's Soleimani and restored deterrence. New peace deals between Israel and Arab nations were announced. It was the only presidency since Hamas took power in Gaza in which there wasn’t a hot war between the Jewish state and an Iranian proxy.
Unfortunately, the Biden team chose to revert to Obama’s policy of appeasement. Obama and his team remain influential within the Biden administration. It expressed a desire to reach a new accord with Iran and, to that end, removed Iranian proxies such as the Houthis from the State Department's list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations. Sanctions enforcement all but ceased, and Tehran’s coffers overflowed again. Iran continued to take hostages and increased attacks on American bases in the Middle East, but the Biden administration responded with bags of money and outstretched hands of supplication. Worse still, the administration continued to do so despite revelations that the regime was plotting to murder former Trump administration officials. The administration gave aid to groups with ties to Hamas and restored funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which has employed Hamas operatives and helped hide its weapons. “We assess there is a high-risk Hamas could potentially derive indirect, unintentional benefit from U.S. assistance to Gaza,” a State Department memo admitted in March 2021.
By April 2023, Iranian proxies had attacked American bases 83 times since Biden’s swearing-in ceremony. The administration, however, responded only four times. Negotiations with the regime continued unabated. A Jerusalem Post report indicated that Hamas initially planned the Oct. 7 attack for Passover in April 2023 but delayed it until Iran received $6 billion from the U.S. Hamas reportedly plotted the attack for two years, meaning planning was underway while Washington was negotiating with the regime. Moral bankruptcy has begotten barbarism.
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The predictable result has been more war, much of it likely inadvertently funded by the U.S. According to Richard Goldberg, a senior adviser for the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Iran has received at least $50 billion in sanctions relief since Biden took office. Hamas and Iran are using weapons likely financed by American sanctions relief. The delisted Houthis have launched missiles at Israelis and Americans.
It didn’t have to be this way. “Decline,” the late commentator Charles Krauthammer once said, “is a choice.” In the Middle East, that choice was made — and thousands are dying for it.
Sean Durns is a Washington, D.C.-based foreign affairs analyst. His views are his own.