Tehran again snubs Obama, Bin Laden calls US president “powerless” to end war

In the last 24 hours, by rare coincidence, two Islamic extremist leaders have shown public contempt for US president Barack Obama: Iran stands by its opposition to nuclear dialogue, the central plank of Obama’s foreign policy platform, and al Qaeda’s Osama bin Laden in an apparently new audio tape says Obama is “powerless” to end the Afghan war.
Sunday, Sept. 13, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, using the presentation of the new UK ambassador Simon Gass’s credentials, threw out of court any discussion on the Iranian nuclear issue: “From the Iranian nation’s viewpoint, the nuclear case is closed,” said Ahmadinejad, two days after Washington accepted Tehran’s offer to start talks with the Six Powers on global issues excluding its nuclear program.
Sunday, the Iranian president hammered the point home again: “Having peaceful nuclear technology is Iran’s lawful and definite right…The Iranian people will never allow anybody to interfere in the country’s internal affairs.”
In other words, by consenting to talks which Iran has made contingent on the non-negotiation of its nuclear activities, the Obama administration will have only blame itself to blame when the long-anticipated dialogue is a monologue, or six monologues, by the US and its five European partners, to a mute Iranian delegate.
The apparent voice of Osama bin Laden, released early Monday Sept. 14 on radical Islamic sites, ridiculed the US president: Two days after the eighth anniversary of the 9/11attacks, al Qaeda’s leader now says their causes were chiefly “your support to your Israeli allies who occupy our land of Palestine.”
According to bin Laden, when Obama became president and retained many of the Bush administration’s military leaders, such as defense secretary Robert Gates, “reasonable people knew that Obama is a powerless man who will not be able to end the (Afghan) war as he promised.”
The al Qaeda leader went on to say: “If you end the war, so be it. But if it is otherwise, all we will do is continue the war of attrition against you on all possible axes.”
The tape was accompanied by old still photos of bin Laden. His last video appearance on Sept. 7, 2007 was widely presumed to be faked.
debkafile‘s counter-terror sources note that two radical Islamic leaders with large followings have combined, deliberately or not, to dull the impact of Barack Obama’s outreach to the Muslim world for a fresh start in US-Muslim relations in his Cairo speech of June 4 and demonstrated how realpolitik operates in that world.