Obama-Encouraged Iran Uranium Plan Spurned by Obama

A tiny part of a long, well-worth-reading post.

Ray McGovern at Consortium News:

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has reacted strongly to the Israeli attack on the relief ships, the largest of which sailed from Turkey. According to one report, Turkey has served warning that Turkish Navy ships will escort future relief convoys to Gaza.

Erdogan has had it with Israeli mistreatment of Muslims in his eastern Mediterranean neighborhood. On Jan. 29, 2009, at the economic summit in Davos, he leveled harsh criticism to Israeli President Shimon Peres’s face, labeling Gaza “an open-air prison.”

Erdogan angrily cited “the sixth commandment — Thou Shalt Not Kill,” adding, “We are talking about killing” in Gaza. Erdogan’s one-and-a-half-minute tirade was captured on camera by the BBC.

Five days before Erdogan’s outburst, the Brazilian government also condemned Israel’s bombing of Gaza and its effect on the civilian population as a “disproportionate response.”

It seems to have been the atrocity in Gaza that galvanized the successful joint effort by Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan and Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva to defy Israel by getting Iran to agree to transfer fully half of its low-enriched uranium to Turkey for further processing, rendering it unusable for a nuclear weapon.

Defy Israel? you ask. If Israel believes that low-enriched uranium is an essential part of an “existential threat” to Israel from eventual nuclear weapons in Iran, would the Israelis not be delighted at Iran’s agreement to send half to Turkey? Good question.

If the truth be told, Israel cares a lot less about Iran’s uranium that it does about forcing “regime change” in Tehran. Netanyahu does not want any agreement with Iran; he wants sanctions against Iran, and eventually a military conflict.

And this twin wish is shared by American neocons who remain influential in the Obama administration and in the FCM.

The pro-Israeli hardliners appear to be the ones running U.S. policy on the Middle East, not Obama, who seems only nominally in charge. Unusually clear proof of this came when the Brazilians released a letter revealing that Obama had personally encouraged the Brazilian and Turkish leaders to pursue the kind of deal they were able to work out with the Iranians.

Thus, the leaders of Brazil and Turkey were surprised when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and other administration spokespeople trashed the tripartite Iran-Turkey-Brazil deal and pressed ahead with a new round of sanctions.

And the President? Did he step up and acknowledge encouraging Brazil and Turkey to seek the uranium deal? Well, he don’t say nothin’.