According to the Wall Street Journal, this is Obama's fourth letter to Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei continuing US President's attempt to discuss anti-ISIL cooperation and the ongoing nuclear talks with Teheran. It has drawn the ire of Republicans, now the new Congressional majority, who have called the situation "outrageous", even more so as the news of the letter comes after Obama asked Congress to authorize funding for 1,500 more US troops to Iraq.
Read Between the Lines
If the letter itself is true, then it exposes some double dealing on the part of the US. All arguments aside about whether or not Obama should have notified Congress of his correspondence, he is in effect presenting an ominous ultimatum: submit to our demands at the upcoming nuclear talks or we won't help you defeat ISIL. But wait a minute — isn't the US supposedly fighting ISIL, which Obama told the UN was one of the greatest threats to the world today? Well, why would Obama make US-Iranian cooperation against ISIL conditional on a nuclear agreement, one that's been extremely politicized from the beginning? If the US was really serious about beating ISIL, it wouldn't be playing this game and would instead work with Tehran in combating this regional threat.
Terrorist Blackmail
The logic thus goes that the US is able to help Iran fight ISIL, but it's conscientiously choosing not to until its demands are met. So much for broadening the ‘international coalition' against the terrorists. Obama has now exposed the politically inconvenient fact that nobody in Washington dare say aloud: the US is fine with ISIL when it's attacking America's enemies (the Syrian government, Iran), but the moment it turns against its allies (Kurds, FSA, parts of the Iraqi government), that's when it must be destroyed. What we see now is that Obama acknowledges that ISIL is a threat to Iran but is essentially saying that he'll let the problem fester as long as possible in some areas significant to Iran until a nuclear deal is reached. If that's not terrorist blackmail, what is?
It's Not About Nukes
All of these murky manueverings must mean that the proposed nuclear deal is really important to Washington then, right? Yes and no. First off, the US' own intelligence agencies have long said that Iran is not trying to build a nuclear bomb, so there's in reality no threat to it having nuclear energy technology (the right of which is granted to it by the Non-Proliferation Treaty) in the first place. But, the US politicized the whole thing from the beginning because it wanted to contain Iran's rising Mideast hegemony that threatens America's own. It's not Shia versus Sunni, it's Resistance versus America, and the US knows that Iran is supreme leader of influencing anti-American resistance in the region. It wanted to cripple the country's economy while building up a proxy network of Gulf States against it.
If Iran strikes a deal with the US, it's only to alleviate the years of Western-imposed economic suffering that the country's civilians have faced. It would also be a soft information victory for Washington, which could for the first time in American history try to (misleadingly) say that ‘sanctions work'. Also, the US is scared of future Russian-Iranian cooperation, and it doesn't want its two ‘enemies' getting too close. Therefore, should it so choose, now is the right time for it to strategically roll back the sanctions to bring Western companies in and keep Russian ones out. Russia is looking for non-Western partners to cushion the effect of the recent sanctions war, and if the US can keep Moscow and Tehran apart, it would be in Washington's ultimate benefit. This and the idea of neutering its regional and resistant influence are the primary reasons why the US is going to the extreme of using terrorist blackmail against Iran.
