WarSclerotic

In his address to the U.N. General Assembly last week, U.S. President Barack Obama called the conflict in the ‎Middle East “a fight no one is winning.” I think the evidence suggests he’s wrong. I think Iran is ‎making significant gains.‎

That should distress us because the Islamic republic, no less than the Islamic State group, is committed to waging jihad. Iran’s 1979 revolution was led by Ayatollah ‎Ruhollah Khomeini, a Persian, Shiite, Islamist version of Lenin. His intention: to spark a global ‎uprising against the West.‎

Khomeini championed social justice — of a sort.

“If one permits an infidel to continue in his role ‎as a corrupter of the earth,” he said in a 1984 speech celebrating the birth of the Prophet Muhammad‎, “the ‎infidel’s moral suffering will be all the worse. If one kills the infidel, and this stops him from ‎perpetrating his misdeeds, his death will be a blessing to him.”‎

Among Khomeini’s disciples: Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and Iran’s current ‎president, the “moderate” Hassan Rouhani. Last year, Rouhani observed: “Saying ‘Death to ‎America’ is easy. We need to express ‘Death to America’ with action.” His most strategic action ‎to date: pushing back Obama’s red lines on Iran’s acquisition of a nuclear weapons capability. ‎

My colleague Mark Dubowitz observes that Obama has gone from “dismantle and disclose” to ‎‎”disconnect, defer and deter.”

In other words, the president had been demanding that Iran’s rulers dismantle key elements of ‎their nuclear program and disclose past weaponization activities. Now he appears prepared to ‎settle for disconnecting some centrifuges or reducing the uranium gas fed into them (both easily ‎reversible), deferring demands that Iran’s rulers admit past weaponization until after a deal is ‎signed, and hoping that a breakout to nuclear weapons can be deterred through enhanced ‎inspections and whatever economic leverage the West retains — probably not much, since a senior ‎official in charge of the negotiations is already promising to suspend major sanctions soon after a ‎deal. ‎

Obama’s retreat also is reflected in his rhetoric. A few years ago he was vowing to use “all ‎elements of American power to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon.” Last week: ‎‎”America is pursuing a diplomatic resolution to the Iranian nuclear issue. This can only happen if ‎Iran takes this historic opportunity. My message to Iran’s leaders and people is simple: Do not let ‎this opportunity pass.” Opportunity?‎

This should be big news. Among the reasons it is not: Islamic State’s flamboyant barbarism ‎has been consuming the oxygen, making it easy to forget that Iran has long been, according to ‎the U.S. State Department, the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism.‎

It was Iran’s rulers who instructed Hezbollah, their Lebanon-based militia, to bomb the U.S. ‎Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983. It was Iran’s elite Quds Force that was implicated in the ‎unsuccessful 2011 plot to blow up a Washington restaurant. Since 2003, Iran and its militias ‎have, with impunity, killed as many as 1,000 American soldiers in Iraq. ‎

Right now, both the Quds Force and Hezbollah have “boots on the ground” in Syria, fighting in ‎support of the Assad regime. They have been responsible for a high percentage of the 200,000 ‎deaths there over the past three years. ‎

Within Iran, since Rouhani became president, roughly 1,000 Iranians have been executed. Just ‎last week, Ahmed Shaheed, the U.N.’s special investigator on human rights in Iran, released a ‎report detailing multiple cases of torture, rape, electroshock, burnings, amputations and floggings.

Saeed Abedini, an Iranian-American Christian pastor, has spent more than two years in Iranian ‎prisons, charged with “attempting to sway Iranian youth away from Islam.” Arizona-born Amir ‎Hekmati, a former U.S. Marine who went to Iran in 2011 to visit his grandmother, remains ‎incarcerated on charges of spying for the CIA. Robert Levinson, a private investigator and ‎former FBI agent, has been held in Iran since 2007. ‎

Iran has ranked “among the world’s top three worst jailers of the press every year since 2009,” ‎according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Among those being held: Washington Post ‎correspondent Jason Rezaian and his wife, Yeganeh Salehi, also a reporter. Arrested in July, they ‎have yet to be charged with any crime.‎

Iran’s rulers don’t like Islamic State — it’s a Sunni rival — but they are largely responsible for ‎its growth.

“At Iran’s behest, Nouri al-Maliki’s Shiite-led government in Iraq systematically ‎arrested, tortured and murdered members of that country’s Sunni minority,” wrote Adam Ereli, ‎former U.S. ambassador to Bahrain. Such policies “paved the way for the stunning political and ‎military conquests in Iraq by Islamic State terrorists.”‎

It was Obama’s withdrawal from Iraq — with not even a residual force left behind — that made it ‎possible for Tehran to start calling the shots in Baghdad. And his passive response to the Assad ‎regime’s brutal crackdown on peaceful protesters in 2011 created the vacuum that soon was ‎filled by foreign jihadis.‎

At this point, dropping bombs on Islamic State fighters is a treatment, not a cure. Worse yet: ‎The current campaign could succeed in weakening Islamic State while strengthening the ‎Islamic republic. If that happens, if Khamenei achieves his ambition to become the world’s first ‎nuclear-armed jihadi, Obama will be responsible for a blunder of worldwide, historical ‎proportions — one that will shape the remainder of this century.‎

Not much time is left to avoid that outcome. Negotiations with Iran are to conclude Nov. 24. The ‎president would be wise to make clear that no agreement is preferable to a bad agreement. Such a ‎decision will require courage, resolve and recognition that negotiations, like wars, do produce ‎winners and losers, and that it matters which the United States turns out to be.‎

Clifford D. May is president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a ‎columnist for the Washington Times.‎