February 14-2014
President Obama says he hopes that the ongoing talks with Iran won’t just solve the nuclear issue but will bring Iran back into the international community and restore stability to the Middle East without Sunnis and Shias killing each other.
Obama’s very expansive view of the possibilities for the talks clashes, however, with the much narrower view in the State Department, where officials say the talks are confined to the nuclear issue because tackling all the world’s problems with Iran is too much and would mean failure on everything.
Obama spoke out in lengthy interviews with New Yorker magazine editor David Remnick, who has written a nearly 17,000-word profile of the president as he begins his sixth year in office. Remnick interviewed Obama for hours in the Oval Office and on Air Force One late last year and early in January.
Remnick writes that Obama believes if the current diplomatic efforts with Iran prevail, it could bring a new stability to the region.
“It would be profoundly in the interest of citizens throughout the region if Sunnis and Shias weren’t intent on killing each other,” Obama said. “And, although it would not solve the entire problem, if we were able to get Iran to operate in a responsible fashion — not funding terrorist organizations, not trying to stir up sectarian discontent in other countries, and not developing a nuclear weapon — you could see an equilibrium developing between Sunni—or predominantly Sunni—[Persian] Gulf states and Iran in which there’s competition, perhaps suspicion, but not an active or proxy warfare.”
On Syria, Obama said he feels confident he made the right decision not to launch an air attack on Syria’s chemical weapons, although, he confided when prompted, he is “haunted by what’s happened” there.
But, he said, “It is very difficult to imagine a scenario in which our involvement in Syria would have led to a better outcome, short of us being willing to undertake an effort in size and scope similar to what we did in Iraq”—that is, sending in ground troops to conquer the country.
On the use of drones, Obama defended his strategy of using them to kill terrorism suspects abroad, saying his “preference” remains to capture and prosecute them. But, if that proves infeasible, “I cannot stand by and do nothing.”
He said, “What I’ve tried to do is to tighten the process so much and limit the risks of civilian casualties so much that we have the least fallout from those actions. But it’s not perfect.”