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FOREIGN POLICY

Biden’s Iran Deal Is Even Worse Than It Looked Andrew McCarthy

https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/10/bidens-iran-deal-is-even-worse-than-it-looked/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=top-bar-latest&utm_term=fifth

The administration didn’t just arrange a ‘prisoner swap’ — it allowed Tehran’s agents to remain in the U.S.

The more one looks at President Biden’s decision to waive sanctions on Iran — in essence, to pay a ransom to the mullahs in exchange for the release of American hostages — the more peculiar it appears, and the less the administration’s explanations make sense.

I’ve already had plenty to say about Biden’s provision of $6 billion to the regime in Tehran (see, e.g., here, here, and here). Regardless of what administration officials say about the restrictions in effect to prevent Iran from diverting the loot to nefarious activities, the stubborn fact remains that Biden chose to make $6 billion available, via Qatar, to the world’s leading state sponsor of anti-American terrorism. Again, it doesn’t matter if Iran has direct access to these funds; if it can direct its ally Qatar to disburse it for its legitimate government activities, then the regime can redirect to terrorism funds that were previously allocated to those legitimate activities. That’s such common sense that Iran’s own president touted it, as Noah Rothman relates.

But let’s look beyond the money to other aspects of Biden’s deal with Iran — consummated on September 11, of all days.

The deal was pitched to the nation as a prisoner swap. Iran released five Americans whom it had imprisoned on trumped up spying charges; plus, it allowed one prisoner’s mother and wife to exit the country (though not imprisoned, they had previously not been permitted to leave). In exchange (besides the $6 billion), the United States was required to release five Iranian convicts who had been or were being prosecuted by the Justice Department on various charges arising out of their clandestine work on Iran’s behalf.

Hamas’s Deception – and Our Self-Deception by Caroline Glick

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20051/hamas-deception

The US and Israel continue to base their policies on the fiction that the Palestinian Authority is willing to coexist with the Jewish state.

“We made [the Israelis] think Hamas was busy with governing Gaza, and that it wanted to focus on the 2.5 million Palestinians [there] and had abandoned the resistance altogether. All the while, under the table, Hamas was preparing for this big attack.” — Ali Baraka, senior Hamas terrorist, RT.

“We reject the practices of killing civilians or abusing them on both sides because they contravene morals, religion and international law.” — Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, Reuters, October 12, 2023.

Abbas’s statement is notable for many reasons. It doesn’t name Hamas. It draws a moral equivalence between Israel’s counterattack in Gaza and Hamas’s orgiastic rape, torture, murder, immolation and kidnapping of babies, children, women and men. And it came after five days in which Abbas and the rest of Palestinian society did nothing but celebrate and defend Hamas’s atrocities.

The subtext was clear. Hamas is the bad guy. The Palestinian Authority is the good guy. And if that weren’t apparent as Biden spoke, Blinken’s decision to meet with Abbas made the point explicit.

Fatah also called for all Palestinians to join Hamas’s jihad against Israel.

The fakery of Abbas’s milquetoast condemnation of Hamas’s atrocities is self-evident when seen in the context of his actions and statements and those of the PA, PLO, Fatah and the Palestinian public. But it was clearly sufficient to convince Blinken that it is reasonable to meet with him and continue to base US policy on the fiction that the PA represents a moderate force within Palestinian society that is willing to peacefully coexist with the Jewish state.

Israel and the US have refused to acknowledge that they have been played by the PA the same way they were played by Hamas for the past two years, and Hamas was able to deceive Israel and the US for two years because they wanted to be deceived. Israel’s generals wanted to believe that the Palestinians writ large aren’t implacable foes. They can be appeased. We don’t have to defeat them.

And the Biden administration, like most of its predecessors, wanted to believe the deception — and to still believe it in the PA’s case — because they want to believe that Israel is to blame for the violence waged against it. The lie of Israeli culpability is the foundation of 50 years of US Middle East peacemaking efforts. The lie of Palestinian moderation is the rationale for 50 years of near-continuous US pressure on Israel to concede territory to the Palestinians. It has been the justification and rationale for the US opposition to any effort by Israel to defeat the PLO on the battlefield.

The constant assertion “There is no military solution to the Palestinian conflict with Israel” is predicated on the notion that there is a political solution.

But the slaughter of October 7 made clear — and not for the first or the hundredth time — that this isn’t a political conflict. It is an existential one.

How the Biden Administration Helped Iran’s Mullahs Try to Fulfill Their Dream of Annihilating Israel by Majid Rafizadeh

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20047/biden-helped-iran

Look, it’s not even just this $6 billion, which clearly is going to further enrich Iran. It’s closer to $60 billion. If you look at what the Biden administration has done to help this Islamic terrorist regime in Iran by [stopping enforcement of] sanctions, by lifting restrictions, by allowing Iranian oil to increase by 650% over the last year from 400,000 barrels of oil a day to 3 million barrels of oil a day – all of this has strengthened” the Iranian regime. — Former US Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, Fox News, October 9, 2023.

Iran provides roughly $100 million a year to Palestinian terrorist organizations such as Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and $700 million a year to Hezbollah.

Iran’s President Ebrahim Raisi, meanwhile, has already announced that his country will use the new $6 billion “wherever we need it.”

“Our strategy is to erase Israel from the global political map.” — Major General Hossein Salami, now commander-in-chief, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, MEMRI, February 4, 2019.

So far, the Biden administration, in a welcome about-face, has been superb about promising to help Israel defend itself. It is to be hoped that this policy will continue, in Ukraine as well.

Sadly, however, to the Biden administration, the glaringly central role of Iran, without which Hamas would be able to do nothing, remains nowhere in sight.The Biden administration, despite knowing that the Islamic Republic of Iran is the largest funder of the terror group Hamas, nevertheless decided to relax sanctions on Iranian oil exports.

Biden Admin Struggles to Not Let Barbaric Hamas Attack Stop Them From Appeasing Iran His speech made no mention of Iran which funds and arms Hamas By Fred Fleitz

https://amgreatness.com/2023/10/13/biden-admin-struggles-to-not-let-barbaric-hamas-attack-stop-them-from-appeasing-iran/

President Biden was justifiably praised for his remarks on October 7 and 10 pledging “rock solid” American support for Israel and strongly condemning the barbaric terrorist attack against Israel by Hamas, an Iranian terrorist proxy. Biden spoke passionately, calling the Hamas violence “pure unadulterated evil” and a “violation of every code of human morality.” Axios called Biden’s October 10 speech “perhaps the most powerful statement of support for Israel by a sitting U.S. president since Harry Truman recognized the Jewish state in 1948.”

But a crucial omission undermined the moral clarity of Biden’s speeches: there was no mention of Iran which funds and arms Hamas and reportedly was deeply involved in the planning and execution of the October 7 terrorist attack.

Making this worse, Biden officials have tried since last weekend to downplay reports of Iran’s involvement by claiming they haven’t seen any evidence of this. In response to bipartisan criticism of its approach, the Biden administration is now scrambling to address allegations that Iran was behind the attack without giving up its ongoing negotiations on Iran’s nuclear program that have provided Iran with significant sanctions relief and other concessions.

According to a bombshell Wall Street Journal report on October 8, Iranian officials helped plan the Hamas attack against Israel over several weeks and gave the green light to launch it during an October 2, 2023 meeting in Beirut. The Journal also reported that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps worked with Hamas since last August to prepare the air, land, and sea incursions of the attack. The Journal sourced this article to “senior members of Hamas and Hezbollah, another Iran-backed militant group.”

In addition, the BBC reported on October 8 that a Hamas spokesman said Hamas had direct backing from Iran for the attack.

There are many reasons to believe that Iran was intimately involved in the Hamas attack. Aside from the funding and arms it provides to Hamas, the level of sophistication of the attack was well beyond anything Hamas has done before.

How Hamas Fooled the Experts Why so many misread the Palestinian terror group’s openly stated intentions and motives by Armin Rosen

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/how-hamas-fooled-the-experts

For the past 20 years, the best minds in Washington and Jerusalem treated Hamas as a pragmatic political operator whose leaders were satisfied living in the same world as the rest of us. Their charter, first adopted in 1988, endorsed a set of bloodcurdling millenarian goals. But despite the open madness and world-making ambitions of their public pronouncements, Hamas remained a semi-legitimate player, treated as just one unremarkable thread in the Middle East’s rich tapestry of mildly threatening, gun-toting political dreamers. Even to the most hardened Israeli security officials they were a Muslim Brotherhood offshoot whose extreme rhetoric and regrettably unshakable habit of murdering Jewish civilians could be understood within the normative politics of “resistance movements.” Their behavior could therefore be modulated and controlled through a proper combination of sticks and carrots.

This view is untenable after this weekend, but I understand why it existed for so long. I once held versions of it myself. I visited the Gaza Strip on a two-day reporting trip in the winter of 2014, a couple of months after what was naively thought of as a major round of fighting between Israel and Hamas. I joined the ranks of journalists stupid enough to believe what we thought we’d seen there.

The Hamas statelet, though no poorer than places I’d been in Egypt and Jordan, and materially better off than Somalia or South Sudan, possessed its own special feeling of isolation that had the weight of an ambient despair. It was unnerving to turn on the radio and hear martial chanting about avenging Al-Aqsa, or to constantly look at billboards of Knesset member Yehuda Glick in a sniper crosshair. Members of the Strip’s Hamas-controlled police force used the empty lot down the street from my hotel on the Gaza City waterfront as a drilling ground.

Hamas and Amoral Clarity Support for Hamas killers by the college DEI crowd reveals the real moral and intellectual rot in higher ed By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2023/10/12/hamas-and-amoral-clarity/

One unexpected blowback from the medieval Hamas’s barbaric murdering of hundreds of Israeli civilians is the revelation of current global amorality.

More than 20 Harvard university identity politics groups pledged their support to the Hamas murderers—to the utter silence for days of Harvard President Claudine Gay.

Americans knew higher education practiced racist admission policies. It has long promoted racially segregated dorms and graduations. And de facto it has destroyed the First Amendment.

But the overt support for Hamas killers by the diversity, equity, and inclusion crowd on a lot of campuses exposes to Americans the real moral and intellectual rot in higher education.

Democratic Socialist members of the new woke Democrat Party openly expressed ecstatic support for Hamas’s bloodwork.

Their biggest fears were not dead fellow Americans or hostages, or some 1,000 butchered Jewish civilians. Instead they were fearful that righteous Israeli retaliation might destroy the Hamas death machine.

Palestinians for years fooled naïfs in Europe and the Obama and Biden administrations into sending billions of dollars into Gaza.

These monies were channeled to tunnel into Israel, to obtain a huge rocket arsenal, and to craft plans to wipe out Jews.

The Biden administration has blood on its hands.

As soon as Biden took power, he resumed massive subsidies to radical Palestinians, canceled by the prior Trump administration.

He ignored warnings from his own state Department that such fungible moneys would soon fuel Hamas terrorism.

His administration dropped sanctions against Iran, ensuring that Tehran would enjoy a multi-billion-dollar windfall to be distributed to Israel’s existential enemies—another fact well known to the Biden administration.

If the Biden administration had announced overtly that it was rabidly anti-Israel, it would be hard to imagine anything it could have done differently from its present nihilist behavior.

Peek: Why is Biden ignoring Iran’s influence in the Hamas attacks? It’s simple — politics.

https://thehill.com/opinion/international/4252577-why-is-biden-ignoring-irans-influence-in-the-hamas-attacks-its-simple-politics/

Critics of Joe Biden are furious that in his denunciations of the terror attacks on Israel he has not once mentioned Iran.

They don’t get it. If Biden blames Tehran for masterminding and funding the horrific killings of Israeli citizens, he will have to take the next step, which is to punish Iran’s leaders for the senseless barbarism. That next step would include harsh sanctions, including reining in Iran’s oil exports.  

But curbing the flow of Iranian oil would drive up the price of gasoline here in the U.S. Higher prices at the pump correlate closely with Biden’s approval ratings; if the cost of a gallon of gas goes up, his polling goes down. Biden cannot survive another downdraft in his approval ratings, which are already the lowest of any president in a generation. 

It is notable that oil prices have moved only slightly higher since the Hamas attack. The betting is that the White House has no stomach for real penalties on Iran.   

Joe Biden’s response to the horrors perpetrated by Hamas terrorists has been entirely inadequate. The bar is now set so low for this president that liberal media outlets were ecstatic that Biden could raise his voice and display anger at babies being beheaded and Americans being held for ransom. The New York Times’s Peter Brooks waxed poetic about the president’s 10-minute speech: “He bristled with righteous indignation as he denounced the bloody Hamas attack in unforgiving terms and vowed to stand by Israel without equivocation.” Good for President Biden! 

Unfortunately, that righteous indignation is not likely to translate into meaningful pushback against the region’s main sponsor of terror.  

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell penned an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal insisting that Biden “reimpose extensive multilateral sanctions on Tehran and deny Iranian planes overflight rights. Impound the shipping vessels Iran uses to circumvent sanctions. Close Iranian banks with access to the West, and cease the Iranian operations of European businesses. Treat Iranian officials like pariahs and sink Iranian naval boats that threaten international shipping.”  

These are excellent suggestions. But first and foremost, the U.S. must cut off Iran’s oil shipments, its primary source of revenues.  

Made in Tehran: The Iran Experts Who Swayed U.S. Policy Kenneth R. Timmerman

https://www.jewishpolicycenter.org/2023/10/02/made-in-tehran-the-iran-experts-who-swayed-u-s-policy/

Important reporting by Iran International TV and former Wall Street Journal reporter Jay Solomon, has contributed substantial new facts to a long-brewing controversy over Iranian-regime agents of influence in the United States.

These agents were deeply engaged in negotiating the 2015 Iran Nuclear Deal (aka: JCPOA), and more recently, in the Biden administration effort to revive the deal as an “understanding” that would not be submitted to a hostile Congress.

John Kerry made three separate last-minute concessions to the Iranian regime in 2015 after he thought he had a deal. And the regime just happened to know that Kerry would cave on each one, so they pressed for more.

It was obvious to many of us who followed the negotiations as they were taking place that the nuclear deal could have been “written in Tehran,” as I pointed out in a column that appeared the day the deal was finalized.

Now it would appear, from the newly released emails, that “written in Tehran” was not hyperbole. It was the literal truth.

And I was not the only one to smell a rat at the time. Former IAEA nuclear inspector David Albright, who heads the Institute for Science and International Security and tracks the Iranian nuclear program, recalled the lobbying of the pro-regime agents as well in a recent tweet.

“People often forget that during these negotiations, many of these folks were actively opposing US positions and pushing for Iranian ones. They all shifted to zealous supporters after the deal was finalized, but I remember very well what several were doing during the negotiations to try to weaken US positions and our need at my Institute to fend them off privately and publicly, sometimes in informal coordination with US negotiators.

For years, pro-freedom Iranians have excoriated the role of Swedish-Iranian Trita Parsi and his National Iranian American Council, NIAC, calling them the “Iran Lobby” in Washington, DC.

Several NIAC “graduates” went on to play key roles in the Obama administration. Most notorious among them was Sahar Nowrouzzadeh, who was Director for Iran and Iran Nuclear Implementation at the National Security Council from 2014-2015, before burrowing into the State Department’s Policy Planning staff in 2016. She was subsequently demoted during the Trump administration. (Realizing the sensitivity of her post and her NIAC past, NIAC scrubbed its website of her papers and contributions, but not before they had been archived).

But the current revelations are far more serious, as they document what appear to be direct ties between U.S. government officials engaged in making Iran policy, and the Tehran regime.

Nixon and Kissinger: Bringing China in from the Cold Daryl McCann

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2023/09/nixon-and-kissinger-bringing-china-in-from-the-cold/

Henry Kissinger celebrated his hundredth birthday on May 27 this year. Xie Feng, China’s new ambassador to the United States, helped the former Secretary of State—described by Xie as an “old friend” of China—to mark the big day by personally congratulating Kissinger at his home in Connecticut. A few weeks later it was the centenarian Kissinger calling on the Chinese—with Chairman Xi no less—at the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse in Beijing, the very place he had met Premier Zhou Enlai in 1971 to jumpstart the normalisation of relations between the US and China. The symbolism of 2023 was not lost on Beijing’s top officials, who emphasised the need for “peaceful co-existence” between the two superpowers. Kissinger, who claims to have made 101 trips to China since 1969, worries that all the good work he and Richard Nixon did back in 1971-72 to lay the foundations for an effective long-term relationship between Washington and Beijing is being undone, and that we are headed for a Sino-US war. A naysayer might counter that the work he and Nixon did is why we might be heading for war.

President Nixon’s state visit to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), from February 22 to 28, 1972, really was “the week that changed the world”—as Nixon proclaimed after numerous Mao-tai toasts on the final night of his stay. Kissinger, with his formidable intellect, played a crucial role in delivering Nixon’s pro-Beijing gambit. Twice he went behind the Bamboo Curtain to prepare the way for the historic assignation between his boss and Mao Zedong. Nevertheless, it is commonly accepted, even by Kissinger, that Nixon was first to articulate the advantages of conciliation with Communist China. From a pragmatic point of view, always an important aspect of Nixon’s political thinking, there were a multitude of reasons why such conciliation might be timely, many of them concerning the Vietnam War. When running for office in 1968, Nixon promised the American people he would seek “an honourable peace” in Vietnam. Not that he was alone in this. By the end of his time in office, even President Johnson was positioning himself as a prospective peacemaker, if only to help Hubert Humphrey, the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate, in the 1968 election. In fact, John A. Farrell, in his well-documented and mostly non-jaundiced biography, Richard Nixon: The Life (2017), provides convincing evidence that Nixon “threw a monkey wrench” into Johnson’s attempt to spur negotiations with Hanoi in October 1968. Nixon, allegedly, convinced South Vietnam’s President Thieu to delay peace talks until after the election. Farrell comments: “Given the lives and human suffering at stake, and the internal discord that was ripping the United States apart, it is hard not to conclude that, of all Richard Nixon’s actions in a lifetime of politics, this was the most reprehensible.”

Thanks to the Policies of the Obama and Biden Administrations, the New Axis of Evil – Russia, China, North Korea, Iran – Posing a Worldwide Existential Threat by Majid Rafizadeh

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19982/axis-of-evil-russia-china-north-korea-iran

The Biden administration… is also financing the ruling mullahs of Iran with billions of dollars to put the finishing touches on the country’s nuclear program and for delivering more weapons to Russia with which to attack Ukraine.

“We’re sitting still, and the Chinese, the Russians, Iran, North Korea, and several others, are moving to shore up their relations and threaten us in a lot of different places.” — Former US National Security Advisor John Bolton, The Hill, March 12, 2023.

Since Russia invaded Ukraine, the Biden administration seems to be allowing Iran’s ruling mullahs to prosper from the war and emerge as the winners.

“I have a question for you – how does Russia pay Iran for this, in your opinion? Is Iran just interested in money? Probably not money at all, but Russian assistance to the Iranian nuclear program. Probably, this is exactly the meaning of their alliance” — Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Jerusalem Post, November 4, 2022.

“Today, China, Russia, North Korea and Iran continue to invest in technologies to expand their capabilities to hit the United States with nuclear weapons. All four countries have also escalated their threatening rhetoric, indicating their willingness to use nuclear weapons in a military conflict. By expanding their nuclear programs, each has made clear that our nuclear arsenal is no longer a deterrent to their potential use of nuclear weapons.” — U.S. Rep. Mike Turner, Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and a senior member of the House Armed Services Committee, Fox News, May 4, 2023.

Thanks to the Obama and Biden administrations’ monumental capitulations to Iran’s regime — and the refusal of both administrations not only to stop Iran’s nuclear weapons program but also to prevent anyone else from stopping it — the Russian-Iranian-Chinese-North Korean alliance now poses a global existential threat.