Al Arabiya quotes Rafik Hariri Center Senior Fellow Frederic Hof on President Obama’s letter to Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei:
However, the most disturbing passage as Fred Hof, one of America’s best analysts of Syria told me, was the one saying that President Obama “sought to assuage Iran’s concerns about the future of its close ally, Bashar al-Assad of Syria” by assuring the Supreme Leader that “the U.S.’s military operations inside Syria aren’t targeted at Mr. Assad or his security forces.” This is the same Iran that has helped the Assad regime build an impressively repulsive portfolio of war crimes and crimes against humanity. President Obama is well aware of what Assad has done to the people of Syria and how Iran has assisted him. As Hof puts it “The President of the United States should be the last person on earth to assure the Supreme Leader that his criminal client is immune. Principle and decency aside, such an assurance would be bad tactically. Why should the United States worry about Iran and not vice versa? With such an assurance in hand why would the Assad regime exercise any restraint in terms of barrel bombs? How would we expect Iran to react to such an extraordinary attempt to reassure it on Syria?”