The ‘Grand Bargain’ Is A Gift To Iran

Lee Smith has it right: The long “grand bargain” that purportedly removes the risk of a nuclear Iran is actually a gift to the infamous Iranian warlord, Qassem Soleimani, who commands the nation’s foreign military and terrorist activities. It provides Tehran with cash, and all manner of opportunity to cheat on promises to eschew any activity having to do with military nuclear activities. It phases out sanctions on oil, gold, international banking activities and shipping. That translates into more cash–much of which will be spent on killing Iran’s enemies.

Iran has made war on the United States 

We remain number one on Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s enemies list. Iran isdirectly responsible for killing five hundred Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention the bloody death count from the Marine Barracks  in Beirut in 1983 and other subsequent villainies.

The grand bargain enriches the regime and, compared to long-standing United Nations resolutions and practices, actually makes it easier for the Iranians to pursue nukes. If you read the fine print in the main document and the five annexes, you’ll find a roadmap for the Iranians to avoid detection and escape punishment. In every case that matters, our ability to quickly investigate evidence of illicit activity gets referred to a committee (in which the Iranians always participate), which in due course (at least 20+ days) decides if the investigation will be permitted. If the committee can’t resolve it, foreign ministries come into play, adding further delays and complications.

The long document from Vienna isn’t—not yet, anyway—a formal agreement. No one has signed it, and you may recall that last time around Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei proclaimed that, if it hadn’t been signed, no one was bound by it. Moreover, the Iranian Parliament recently passed a law (and the Guardian Council ratified it) making it illegal for the government to permit inspection of military sites. Khamenei could veto it, but will he?

What exactly is the deal worth? 

It’s what I predicted it would be:  a “no-deal deal”  in which the Iranians promise to behave themselves and we pay for it. Tehran gets a big cash “signing bonus” of over a hundred billion dollars, and, over time, an end to various sanctions enacted by the United States, the European Union and the United Nations. Iran swears to do nothing to make atomic bombs, and we permit them to enrich uranium.

But uranium enrichment and nukes are only a footnote to the real message, which is our failure to respond to Iran’s many acts of war against us. Even if the deal is finally agreed and signed, Iranian killers will continue to slaughter their own people and kill opponents in Lebanon, Syria and Iraq. Not only have we done virtually nothing to stop the mayhem, but we have actually coordinated our largely symbolic air campaigns in Iraq and Syria with Iran.

This strategy does us no good 

This is precisely backwards. As Khamenei has said, the Vienna deal in no way mitigates Iran’s hatred of us, or their intention to destroy us. We need to respond by challenging the regime in Tehran. The best way to do that is to do the same thing we did to Mikhail Gorbachev’s Soviet Union: Support the regime’s opponents to create a free Iran. This is no mere gesture; the overwhelming majority of Iranians detest the regime.

Needless to say, no such sensible policy is going to be adopted by this administration. Obama has avidly pursued a strategic embrace of Iran for a long time, beginning with the presidential campaign of 2008. Now he’s collaborating with them on Middle Eastern battlefields, making them much richer—indeed very possibly rescuing them from social/political/economic catastrophe largely of their own making—and more powerful.

Never mind the grand bargain. We need a sensible Iran policy before they kill many more of us.