RUTHFULLY YOURS

The revelation of recent days that, back in January, President Obama agreed that the United Nations should lift its sanctions against two Iranian state banks which financed Iran’s ballistic missile development puts the lie to Washington’s claims – stubbornly maintained for more than a year – that it was determined to rein in the Islamic Republic’s expanding missile program.

In fact, the president’s decision reflects a larger pattern of U.S. backtracking over Iran’s ballistic missiles – one that dates back to well before the landmark U.S.-led global agreement with Iran over its nuclear program in July of 2015.

During the U.S.-led negotiations over that agreement, the president decided they should focus squarely on Iran’s nuclear program and not cover such related issues as Iran’s development and testing of long-range ballistic missiles that can carry nuclear warheads – despite the obvious tie between nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles.

With an agreement over Iran’s nuclear program in place, U.S. officials argued, they could then pressure Iran over not only its ballistic missile program but also its sponsorship of terror, its efforts to destabilize Sunni nations in the region and its increasingly grotesque human rights record at home.

But the public record – of which the new revelation about sanctions relief is now a part, courtesy of The Wall Street Journal – reveals something far different: While negotiating and implementing the nuclear agreement, Washington took multiple steps that not only legitimized Iran’s missile program but actually helped Tehran make further progress.

First and foremost, the United States agreed to soften the global prohibitions directed against that program.

Much of the city of Aleppo lies in ruins after days of airstrikes by Russian and Assad regime forces, and buried in the wreckage is whatever is left of the Obama Administration’s Syria policy. If it’s any consolation to the 275,000 souls trapped in the city, John Kerry has regrets.

That much is clear from a leaked recording of a conversation the Secretary of State had with a group of Syrian civilians engaged in humanitarian work during last month’s U.N. General Assembly. Mr. Kerry complained that “the Russians don’t care about international law, and we do.” He noted that “a lot of Americans don’t believe that we should be fighting and sending young Americans over to die in another country.”

Above all, he lamented that his diplomatic efforts to end Syria’s war were never backed by a credible threat of American military strikes. “I think you’re looking at three people, four people in the Administration who have all argued for use of force, and I lost the argument,” Mr. Kerry said.
The Secretary is right that President Obama doomed whatever chances the U.S. had of shaping a better outcome in Syria when Mr. Obama made clear that nothing, including chemical attacks against civilians, could induce him to deploy even modest force to ground Bashar Assad’s air force or establish no-fly/no-drive zones.

Then again, it’s hard to credit Mr. Kerry as the scorned voice of reason within the Administration when, until last week, he was the most vocal advocate of making common cause with Moscow in Syria.

In May 2015 Mr. Kerry first broke the informal diplomatic quarantine the U.S. had imposed on Russia after it granted Edward Snowden asylum in 2013 and invaded Ukraine the following year. Last month Mr. Kerry was pushing the Pentagon, over the objections of Defense Secretary Ash Carter, to share targeting intelligence with Russia to grease a new cease-fire deal. As with a similar cease-fire Mr. Kerry negotiated earlier this year, Russia violated it within days.

The Obama administration has set about redrawing its relationship with Russia amid this week’s diplomatic breakdown over Syria, taking on one of its most complex foreign-policy challenges just three months before a new president takes office.

Speaking in Brussels on Tuesday, Secretary of State John Kerry held out the possibility of once again working with Moscow after pulling out of talks over a Syrian cease-fire deal the day before.

While he faulted Russia for prolonging the war by tying its interests to the Assad regime and turning a blind eye to its brutality, his comments also underscored Moscow’s influence in bringing any resolution to the conflict.
“Russia knows exactly what it needs to do to get that cessation implemented in a fair and reasonable way,” Mr. Kerry said, as he urged Russia and the Assad regime to grant humanitarian access in Syria.

The move to formally walk away Monday from the cease-fire and military-cooperation agreement reached with Russia last month heightens pressure on Washington to spell out its next steps in Syria. But neither Mr. Kerry nor officials in Washington offered any new specifics Tuesday.

Mr. Kerry said the U.S. wanted Russian and Syrian warplanes out of the skies over Aleppo, but didn’t lay out a plan to do so. U.S. officials also said that one option could involve U.S. strikes on Syrian forces, although they acknowledged such a move carried risks of escalating a confrontation with Russia and is unlikely.

According to a September 30 Wall Street Journal article, the Obama administration signed a secret agreement with Iran to lift U.N. sanctions from two Iranian banks — Bank Sepah and Bank Sepah International — that helped finance Iran’s ballistic-missile program. U.S. and Iranian officials signed this deal on January 17, 2016, the same day Iran released four U.S. prisoners.

U.S officials in January said the prisoners were swapped for the release of seven Iranian prisoners by the U.S. and the removal of 21 persons — mostly Iranian nationals — from an INTERPOL wanted list for violating U.S. laws barring transfers of WMD technology and weapons to Iran.

The American people and Congress did not learn until August that the U.S. prisoners were not allowed to leave Iran until a planeload of $400 million in cash sent by the United States had landed in Iran. This payment — and two more over the next month — has been strongly condemned by Republican congressmen as U.S. ransom payments to a state sponsor of terror.

Commenting on the $400 million cash payment to Iran, the prisoner swap and the lifting of sanctions from the Iranian banks, a senior U.S. official told the Journal, “The timing of all this isn’t coincidental. Everything was linked to some degree.”

The Journal also quoted unnamed Obama officials who justified lifting sanctions against the two Iranian banks to “harmonize the U.N. sanctions list with the U.S.’s” and because “Washington believed Iran had earned more sanctions relief because Tehran had been implementing the terms of the nuclear agreement.” The Obama administration lifted U.S. sanctions against Bank Sepah and Bank Sepah International in July 2015. The U.N. Security Council voted to lift these sanctions on January 17, 2016.

This suggests the removal of sanctions against the Iranian banks was part of a broad ransom agreement to free U.S. prisoners held by Iran.

The secret agreement to lift sanctions against the Iranian banks also violated U.N. Security Council Resolution 2231, passed in July 2015 which endorsed the JCPOA. This resolution stipulated that U.N. missile-related sanctions against Iran would remain in place for eight years. In addition, lifting sanctions against the two banks broke promises to Congress by Obama officials that the nuclear deal would only lift nuclear-related sanctions against Iran and that U.N. missile sanctions would remain in place for eight years.

Here we go again. This is like having to prove that water is wet or that Hillary Clinton is crooked, but since Barack Obama has once again affirmed that jihad terrorists are twisting and hijacking the Religion of Peace, once again it is necessary to prove that unfortunately that is not the case. Obama is right about one thing: this question matters for what strategy the U.S. and the free world should pursue against the jihadis. That’s what makes his denial and willful ignorance nothing short of catastrophic.

CNN reported Thursday that Obama said the question of whether or not to use the term “Islamic terrorist” was “sort of manufactured” issue. He claimed, yet again, that “terrorist organizations like al Qaeda or ISIL…have perverted and distorted and tried to claim the mantle of Islam for an excuse for basically barbarism and death.”

Warming to his point, Obama said: “These are people who’ve killed children, killed Muslims, take sex slaves, there’s no religious rationale that would justify in any way any of the things that they do.”

Is he right? Of course not.

“Killed children”: “It is reported on the authority of Sa’b b. Jaththama that the Prophet of Allah (may peace be upon him), when asked about the women and children of the polytheists being killed during the night raid, said: They are from them.” — Sahih Muslim 4321

“I was very happy to learn about the relevant hadith. I felt overjoyed when I heard it. [Mus’ab Ibn Juthama] told the Prophet Muhammad that while the Muslims would attack the polytheists at night, women and children would be harmed. The Prophet Muhammad answered: ‘[Their offspring] constitute part of them.’ They are part of them, said our beloved Muhammad. This is not merely someone’s opinion. Thus, killing their women and children is permitted.” — Sudanese Muslim cleric Muhammad Al-Jazouli

Russian and Syrian government forces continue to press their offensive in Aleppo, killing hundreds of civilians with incendiary and bunker-busting bombs. Samantha Power, the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, has denounced the assault as “barbarism” and called out Russia at the Security Council for its chronic mendacity and refusal to take responsibility for its participation in the slaughter.

Ms. Power knows something about barbarism and responsibility. In 2001 she published a searing account in the Atlantic about the Clinton Administration’s failure to stop the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, in which as many as 800,000 Tutsis were killed over three months by their Hutu neighbors.

Ms. Power spared no one in her depiction of the Administration’s “almost willful delusion” about the killing, its diplomatic prevarications to avoid using the word “genocide,” and its concern with how U.S. intervention would play in the midterm elections. She was particularly tough on U.S. officials who “were firmly convinced that they were doing all they could—and, most important, all they should—in light of competing American interests and a highly circumscribed understanding of what was ‘possible’ for the United States to do.”
The essay was titled “Bystanders to Genocide.” Ms. Power later expanded the article into a book, “A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide,” for which she was widely praised. Barack Obama read the book and promoted her rise in government.

Fast forward to the present, and Ms. Power can sound like those officials she once scolded for thinking they were doing everything they could given the complexities of the situation.

“Well, Syria is a very complex picture,” Ms. Power told CBS earlier this month. “There are thousands of armed groups. The question again of what military intervention would achieve, where you would do it, how you would do it in a way where the terrorists wouldn’t be the ones to take advantage of it—this has been extremely challenging. But the idea that we have not been doing quote anything in Syria seems absurd. We’ve done everything short of waging war against the Assad regime and we are, I should note, having significant success against ISIL on the ground.”