President Obama emerged from his White House Utopia to tell Americans his $400 million cash payment to Iran was not a ransom payment for the return of five Americans held hostage. Even if true – a highly dubious truth – there are questions that emerge from the incident that the president has not and will not address.
If this payment is an overdue judgment that goes back to 1979, why now? If this wasn’t a ransom payment, why did the Iranians contend the prisoners would not be released till the plane landed? If this was a legitimate payment, why pallets of cash in foreign currencies? Money could be wired to Iran via a third party rather than sending an unmarked aircraft in the middle of the night. And if this wasn’t a ransom payment, because as President Obama noted “we do not pay ransom for hostages… because if we did we’d start encouraging Americans to be targeted,” how does he explain the three Americans taken hostage since the January payment?
Whether one accepts the improbable legalistic argument Obama offers, what matters for future U.S.-Iranian dealings is what the mullahs believe. It is obvious they believe that arresting and holding Americans pays off. In a country on the brink of bankruptcy, the U.S. has bailed it out.
The larger question remains: Why would Obama do that? Behind the monetary exchange lies the naïve belief that the assistance the president gives Iran will be reciprocated with the claim Obama prevented yet another war in the Middle East. That is to be his legacy.
Iranian imperial ambitious have made a mockery of this claim with the testing of a new generation of long range missiles and an upgrade in the weapons employed in Lebanon, Yemen and Syria. President Hassan Rouhani has called his negotiations with the U.S. “the greatest diplomatic victory in the history of Islam.” He is probably right.