RUTHFULLY YOURS

On Wednesday, U.S. President Barack Obama fulfilled a lifelong dream he has spent nearly seven years in office trying to realize.

It is a very different dream from that of Martin Luther King Jr., whom Obama invokes whenever it feeds his own visions of a particular form of grandeur.

This is not to say that rising from modest means to becoming the head of the United States and, by extension, the leader of the free world, is not already about as grand as one can get. But it is America’s greatness — not Obama’s — that enabled him to make it to the White House in the first place.

His ability to pull it off a second time, in spite of a bad economy and the sweeping radicalization of the Middle East, is a measure of how well he had already implemented the methods of his mentor, “Rules for Radicals” author Saul Alinsky, of infiltrating the country’s institutions and destroying them from within.

Indeed, the previously imperfect, but still functional, systems he tackled to chip away at the fabric of society were health, education, welfare and, of course, the family unit. He even set back the very societal strides that allowed for the election of a black president, creating an environment in which race relations took a sharp turn for the worse.

All of this made America ripe for the picking of its enemies.

This is where Obama’s foreign policy comes into play. Like the chisel he took to domestic affairs, Obama strived to strip the United States of its global superpower status. The crowning moment of this endeavor took place in July in Vienna, when the tireless efforts of the U.S.-led P5+1 to persuade the Islamic Republic of Iran to sign an agreement Obama desperately wanted finally paid off.

According to the agreement, Iran will be able to continue to develop and hone its nuclear weapons program, unfettered by the financial constraints of economic sanctions, and increase the flow of funds to its strategically placed terrorist proxies the world over. In exchange, Russia and China, two laughable members of the P5+1, get to do dubious deals with the mullahs in Tehran; Europe, inundated with refugees from Muslim countries, gets phony guarantees about its short-term safety; and Obama gets to tell himself he has finally earned the Nobel Peace Prize he was awarded about five minutes into his presidency.

This week, he scored his ultimate coup — over Congress. Faced with a majority of the House and Senate opposing the deal, Obama announced that if it did not pass when put to a vote in September, he would exercise his presidential veto power and force it down the throats of the American people.

The only thing that could have prevented this from happening was a veto-override majority. Alas, one was not to be had. By Wednesday, the fate of the deal was sealed by the Obama camp.

Obama deserves full credit for this and the other disasters he has wreaked.

Where Iran is concerned, one need only look back in time to the early months of Obama’s first term to grasp what he was up to then, and how it led to where we are today.

On June 12, 2009, a rigged election in Iran reinstated then-President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Though opposition candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi clearly had come out ahead of the incumbent, the latter declared victory and hailed his reign as the “will of the people.”

Millions of Iranians took to the streets to protest the false claims on the part of the regime they had intended to replace with what they believed would be a more democratic one.

During these demonstrations, in the course of which Iranians begged the U.S. to help them, a young woman named Neda was gunned down, and the photo of her bullet-ridden body and haunted eyes became the key symbol of the Iranian people’s wish to be free of the repression the Islamic Revolution of 1979 had imposed on them.

Viewing these events from behind his desk in the Oval Office, Obama was “impartial.” He had entered the White House only five months earlier, pledging to overturn his predecessor’s policies. Among these was George W. Bush’s position on radical Muslim regimes and groups in general, and on Iran specifically.

Claiming that the only way to rid Iran of its nuclear and hegemonic ambitions would be by extending goodwill gestures to its leaders, Obama abandoned the term “axis of evil,” which Bush had coined to define state sponsors of terrorism, Iran being a prime example.

Convinced, as well, that the U.S. had become a pariah among nations for being a capitalist, imperialist bully, Obama set about to show the world that America was in no way superior to other countries and cultures.

His wife, Michelle, shared this dim view of her country. Her response to her husband’s electoral victories in a series of Democratic primaries was to say it was the first time in her adult life that she was proud to be an American.

It was neither ignorance nor oversight, then, which caused Obama to abandon the genuine freedom-seekers in Iran, and try to engage the vicious ayatollahs. It was part of his plan, born of a twisted ideology that America was to blame for the hatred it inspired among despots — so ridiculous a notion that it allows for ignoring the plight of truly terrorized populations, prey to the tyrannical oppression of their leaders.

It is also at the core of his appalling attitude towards Israel. As a traditional ally of the U.S., with shared values, it, too — in Obama’s eyes — is to blame for the enmity it arouses.

It is impossible to get into Obama’s head to determine whether he actually believes the nuclear pact he is signing with the devil is the lesser of all evils.

One thing is clear, however: His presidency has been paved not with failures, but with a string of the most successfully orchestrated disasters in history. For this, the “axis of evil” Obama so stringently denies owes him a great debt of gratitude.

Ruthie Blum is a Tel Aviv-based journalist and author.