The art of the deal?

Matthew Continetti writes at the Washington Free Beacon,

International business consultant Wendy Sherman was the chief American negotiator of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the Iran nuclear deal agreed to by President Obama in 2015 and abrogated by President Trump earlier this year. She has a new book out, Not for the Faint of Heart: Lessons in Courage, Power, and Persistence, and in the space of 14 Tweets promoting it the other day she managed to combine basically everything I dislike about Washington.

..."After dinner on the 25th day, I met with Abbas Aragchi, Iran's lead negotiator, with his partner, Majid Takht-Ravanchi to go over one final UN resolution." Aragchi agreed. Then he backtracked. He wanted to reopen a matter previously considered closed. What happened next is the most stunning thing I have ever heard a diplomat reveal.

"I lost it," Sherman continues. "I began to tell [sic], and to my frustration and fury, my eyes began to well up with tears. I told them their tactics jeopardized the entire deal."

The Iranians sat there, "stunned" and "silent," as the representative of the United States of America, the global economic and military superpower, broke down in the middle of a conference room inside a posh hotel in the Austrian capital. "Women are told early in life that it's not socially acceptable to get angry," Sherman laments. "And it's a sign of weakness to let people see you cry." Men are told that too, by the way.

There's a reason. Confidence and decorum are traits of strong leaders. Surrender to one's emotions is a sign of loss of hope and will, of a lack of self-control. You're more likely to get what you want by showing no emotion, by refusing to bend. That is exactly how the Iranians got the deal of their dreams, a nuclear agreement with the United States that legitimized their regime, infused their economy with cash, exempted their military sites from inspection, froze uranium enrichment at levels they were comfortable with, addressed neither ICBMs nor terrorism, and would begin to free them from obligations after 10 years.

...Sherman lauds an agreement that is no longer operative. The JCPOA is gone, a relic. President Trump withdrew the United States from the arrangement. Consequently, Iran's economy is collapsing and the regime faces internal protests. Trump never had to set foot in the Palais Coburg.

Read more here.

Should we be worried about Trump or Iran?

Ben Shapiro writes at The Daily Wire,

...former Obama officials are now calling for foreign countries to withdraw their ambassadors from America and expel America’s ambassadors because we’re no longer going to funnel cash to the largest state sponsor of terrorism on the globe.

Ben is referring to a New York Times piece written Friday by two former top Obama officials.

So America wants to prevent Iran from gaining a bomb, and to protect its actual Middle Eastern allies from the predations of Iran’s non-nuclear aggression – and Obama’s team says Europe should throw America’s ambassadors out for this. Good luck with that one.

But then these Obama officials go further: they suggest that Europe should start sanctioning American companies.

...So we penalize companies doing business with one of the most evil regimes on the planet, and Team Obama wants Europe to stop doing business with America. Could we safely call this un-American?

Read more here.

Iranian official threatens to reveal which western officials took bribes!

Vivek Saxena reports at BizPacReview,

Shortly after President Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the Iran nuclear deal last Tuesday, an adviser to a top Iranian official retaliated by dropping a bombshell threat.

The threat concerned the president’s plan to reimpose sanctions on Iran:

An adviser to H.J.Ansari Zarif, the deputy for parliamentary and Iranian affairs within Iran’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, specifically threatened to expose every corrupt official who accepted bribes to make the Iran deal happen three years ago.

“If Europeans stop trading with Iran and don’t put pressure on US then we will reveal which western politicians and how much money they had received during nuclear negotiations to make #IranDeal happen,” he either said or wrote, according to Hassan Ghashghavi.

Read more here.

The Obama Iran deal is not just unfixable, but truly catastrophic!

In Powerline, Scott Johnson reprints a statement by Senator Ted Cruz about the Iran deal.

The] stunning revelations by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu powerfully demonstrate why the Obama Iran nuclear deal is not just unfixable, but truly catastrophic. The Prime Minister’s presentation was remarkable—unprecedented—and worth watching in full. Through extraordinary intelligence operations, Israeli agents captured over 100,000 secret documents and files from Iran. These Iranian documents prove that (1) for two decades, Iran has conducted a clandestine nuclear weapons program; (2) Iran lied repeatedly, and brazenly, denying that secret program; (3) the Obama nuclear deal was predicated on that edifice of lies; and (4) Iran is today in violation of that deal.

The national security consequences of the Obama Iranian nuclear deal are twofold: First, America has allowed billions of dollars to flow to the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism, a nation directly responsible for the murder of hundreds of U.S. servicemen and women. And second, those billions of dollars have also propped up a despotic regime and provided vast resources for ongoing ballistic missile tests designed to enable Iran to launch a nuclear weapon on the American homeland.

In light of these astonishing Israeli revelations, the course before President Trump is clear. As the President has said repeatedly, this deal is a “terrible deal,” even worse than many previously realized. The United States should therefore withdraw immediately, re-impose crushing sanctions, work to encourage our allies to do the same, and do everything necessary to insure that the Ayatollah Khamenei never — never — acquires the nuclear weapons to make good on his pledge of “death to America.”

Read more here.

Disingenuous Wordplay

Omri Ceren writes in Commentary about the disastrous Iran deal.

...The negotiations are problematic. The New York Times reported that, as far as the Europeans are concerned, the exercise requires convincing Trump they’ve “changed the deal without actually changing it.” Public reports about the inspection fix suggest that the Europeans are loath to go beyond urging the IAEA to request inspections, which the agency may be too intimidated to do. The ballistic-missile fix is shaping up to be a political disaster, with the Europeans refusing to incorporate anything but long-range missiles into the deal. That would leave us with inadequate tools to counter Iran’s development of ballistic missiles that could be used to wipe Israel, the Saudis, and our regional bases off the map.

Go here to read his thorough analysis of all the problems that are involved in trying to fix this nightmare deal.

Maybe this will help us understand why Tillerson was fired!

Adam Kredo reported in the Washington Free Beacon last week before Tillerson was fired,

Iran is undertaking a massive buildup of its ballistic missile program, sparking fears of a "second Holocaust" amid sensitive international negotiations that could see the Trump administration legitimize Iranian missiles capable of striking Israel, according to multiple sources familiar with ongoing diplomatic talks.

As the Trump administration and European allies continue discussions aimed at fixing a range of flaws in the landmark Iran nuclear deal, sources familiar with the progression of these talks say the United States is caving to European demands limiting restrictions on Iran's ballistic missile program.

While the Trump administration went into the negotiations with a hardline stance on cutting off Iran's ballistic missile program, it appears the United States is moving closer in line with European positions that would only regulate a portion of the missiles.

Multiple sources with knowledge of the ongoing talks told the Washington Free Beacon U.S. officials have been backpedaling on key demands originally proposed by President Trump in order to preserve the agreement and appease European allies who are eager to continue doing business with Tehran.

Senior Trump administration officials recently told the Free Beacon the United States is prepared to abandon the nuclear deal if European allies fail to address what it views as a range of flaws in the nuclear deal that have enabled Iran's missile buildup and allowed it to continue critical nuclear research.

However, it appears the United States is losing ground in the talks, moving closer to the European position, which includes what insiders described as only cosmetic changes to the nuclear deal that fail to adequately address Iran's massive missile buildup.

"If Trump doesn't take control of these negotiations, he will be to Iranian missiles what Obama was to Iranian enrichment," said one veteran foreign policy official with direct knowledge of the ongoing negotiations in Europe. "Combined, Obama and Trump's negotiators could end up giving us a bipartisan Iranian nuclear weapon capable of bringing a second Holocaust. What does it say that Donald Trump's negotiators have a weaker position on Iranian missiles than the United Nations?"

Speculation the Trump administration will cave on the missile issue has been fueled by off-record meetings between Trump administration officials and foreign policy insiders, as well as recent comments by the State Department that only "long-range" missiles are currently up for discussion, according to sources who spoke to the Free Beacon.

The State Department would not comment on the current state of the talks, but told the Free Beacon the ballistic missiles issue remains on the agenda.

This includes "preventing Iran from developing or testing a long-range ballistic missile," according to a State Department official.

This does not appear to include shorter-range missiles that could strike Israel.

A White House National Security Council official also declined to discuss the current state of the negotiations, only telling the Free Beacon, "talks are ongoing."

One senior congressional official with knowledge of the efforts to crackdown on Iran's missile program expressed shock at how the administration's negotiating position has evolved.

"Give me a break," said the source, who was not authorized to speak on the record about the sensitive discussions. "Is the U.S. negotiating position really going to be watered down from the standard laid out in UNSCR 2231," the United Nations Security Council resolution banning Iranian ballistic missile work.

"We need to address the Iranian ballistic missile threat as it appears today, and ensure Iran does not have a free pass to potentially test and acquire ballistic missiles that can be used to rain nuclear bombs down on Riyadh and Jerusalem," the source said.

As discussions of the deal continue, the U.S. intelligence community has issued a wide ranging warning about the progress Iran has made in its ballistic missile work, which is among the largest stockpile in the region.

Iran currently "has the largest inventory of ballistic missiles in the Middle East," according to the U.S. director of national intelligence, who recently highlighted the issue in an annual threat assessment.

"Tehran's desire to deter the United States might drive it to field an ICBM," or intercontinental ballistic missile, which is capable of carrying a nuclear payload, according to the DNI. "Progress on Iran's space program, such as the launch of the Simorgh SLV in July 2017, could shorten a pathway to an ICBM because space launch vehicles use similar technologies."

Iran has used billions of dollars in cash windfalls it received as part of the nuclear agreement to pursue ballistic missile research and construction, according to the U.S. intelligence community.

"Iran continues to develop and improve a range of new military capabilities to target U.S. and allied military assets in the region, including armed UAVs, ballistic missiles, advanced naval mines, unmanned explosive boats, submarines and advanced torpedoes, and anti-ship and land-attack cruise missiles," the DNI warned. "Iran has the largest ballistic missile force in the Middle East and can strike targets up to 2,000 kilometers from Iran's borders."

This endangers Israel and is fueling concerns the Trump administration will fail to constrain the program at a time when Iran is increasingly threatening the Jewish state with a strike.

While United Nations Security Council resolutions currently ban Iran from conducting ballistic missile work, the Islamic Republic has openly flaunted the ban and vowed to never stop its buildup.

In 2013, the Obama administration and Congress agreed that Iran should not be able to test fire any ballistic missile exceeding 500km, or about 310 miles. That benchmark eventually increased to 2,000km, or 1,240 miles, following opposition by Iran.

Legislation proposed by Rep. Peter Roskam (R., Ill.) includes a "zero tolerance" clause on Iranian ballistic missiles, meaning that all sanctions waived as part of the nuclear deal would snapback if Iran tests any ballistic missile. Supporters have described the legislation as the "gold standard for how to fix the Iran deal when it comes to ballistic missiles."

With concerns mounting that the Trump administration will walk back its support of a full ballistic missile ban, insiders worry that Israel will suffer the consequences.

"Trump will be legitimizing Iranian missiles that can wipe Israel off the map," said one insider with knowledge of the talks and the administration's evolving position. "What does it say that Donald Trump's negotiators have a weaker position than [Democratic leader] Harry Reid and the United Nations?"

Omri Ceren, a managing director at The Israel Project, a DC-based educational organization that has worked closely with the administration on Iran issues, told the Free Beacon that any fix that does not fully ban ballistic missiles is a failure.

"Congress and the Israelis are on the same page about this. The only acceptable fix to the Iran deal is one that prohibits all nuclear capable ballistic missiles, which is what the relevant U.N. resolution says anyway, if the international community would ever bother to enforce it," Ceren said. "House Republicans even explicitly laid out those expectations in recent legislation they advanced."

Obfuscation and somersaults

In Quadrant, Tony Thomas gives us a detailed analysis of the Iran deal.

Obama’s Iran nuclear deal has not only exposed Israel to a new order of nuclear hazard, but was accompanied by financial shiftiness on a billion-dollar scale and a miasma of half-truths and cover-ups.

Read the whole thing here.

Is social media trying to change the culture by changing what you can say.

Google's fact-checker does not fact-check Left wing sites, according to Andrew Klavan.
Google is selling: Leftism is truth and right of center is a lie.

On social media, in Hollywood and the News, elites create a fantasy world in which you're the bad guy. If you are not allowed to say things, when you discover the truth, you are in danger of becoming part of the AltRight, because they are the only ones who are saying these truths (that blacks commit homicides at seven times the rate of whites, that men and women are different, that capitalist societies are better than communist ones, that Islamists create most terrorist acts).

We must speak the truth, but we must not mistake hatred for the truth! We are all made in the image of God, who loves us. We must speak the truth through the filter of His love and His guidance that we love one another. Don't speak the truth in service of lies!

Michael Doran is Andrew's guest. He wrote a piece in the Wall Street Journal saying that we shouldn't leave the Iran deal; it should be fixed.

President Obama didn't tell the truth about the Iran deal. It was actually a reorientation of American policy in the Middle East toward Iran. We stopped prosecuting Hezbollah drug cases. Obama put the nuclear question aside for ten years. He pulled out of Iraq, even though Iran is right next door. By his actions, he said now the real game is in East Asia. Obama believes we are the problem. Obama believed he was the anointed one to fix it all.

Trump can decide to reapply the sanctions at a moment's notice. How do we contain Iran? What is the smartest way to go about it? If Trump pulls out of the Iran deal, we go into a major conflict with our European allies, the Russians, and the Chinese. Some American legislators are trying to fix the deal by getting rid of the sunsets. Iranian ICBMs are unacceptable. The levels of uranium enrichment must stay where they are now. If the Iranians ever move beyond the terms of the deal, then we are going to reimpose sanctions.

"Those days are now over!"

At the Gatestone Institute, former UN Ambassador John Bolton explains how we can get out of the Iran deal.

Steve Bannon asked me in late July to draw up just such a game plan for the president — the option he didn't have — which I did.

Here it is. It is only five pages long, but like instant coffee, it can be readily expanded to a comprehensive, hundred-page playbook if the administration were to decide to leave the Iran agreement. There is no need to wait for the next certification deadline in October. Trump can and should free America from this execrable deal at the earliest opportunity.

I offer the paper now as a public service, since staff changes at the White House have made presenting it to President Trump impossible. Although he was once kind enough to tell me "come in and see me any time," those days are now over.

Read more here.

"The issue this time isn’t Israel, but Russia, yet the basic contours may very well be the same." ...“preserve” being a euphemism for “leak.”

Lee Smith writes at The Tablet,

But what if Donald Trump wasn’t the first or only target of an Obama White House campaign of spying and illegal leaks directed at domestic political opponents?

In a December 29, 2015 article, The Wall Street Journal described how the Obama administration had conducted surveillance on Israeli officials to understand how Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli officials, like Ambassador Ron Dermer, intended to fight the Iran Deal. The Journal reported that the targeting “also swept up the contents of some of their private conversations with U.S. lawmakers and American-Jewish groups.”

Despite this reporting, it seemed inconceivable at the time that—given myriad legal, ethical, political, and historical concerns, as well as strict National Security Agency protocols that protect the identity of American names caught in intercepts—the Obama White House would have actually spied on American citizens. In a December 31, 2016, Tablet article on the controversy, “Why the White House Wanted Congress to Think It Was Being Spied on By the NSA,” I argued that the Obama administration had merely used the appearance of spying on American lawmakers to corner opponents of the Iran Deal. Spying on U.S. citizens would be a clear abuse of the foreign-intelligence surveillance system. It would be a felony offense to leak the names of U.S. citizens to the press.

Increasingly, I believe that my conclusion in that piece was wrong. I believe the spying was real and that it was done not in an effort to keep the country safe from threats—but in order to help the White House fight their domestic political opponents.

“At some point, the administration weaponized the NSA’s legitimate monitoring of communications of foreign officials to stay one step ahead of domestic political opponents,” says a pro-Israel political operative who was deeply involved in the day-to-day fight over the Iran Deal. “The NSA’s collections of foreigners became a means of gathering real-time intelligence on Americans engaged in perfectly legitimate political activism—activism, due to the nature of the issue, that naturally involved conversations with foreigners. We began to notice the White House was responding immediately, sometimes within 24 hours, to specific conversations we were having. At first, we thought it was a coincidence being amplified by our own paranoia. After a while, it simply became our working assumption that we were being spied on.”

This is what systematic abuse of foreign-intelligence collection for domestic political purposes looks like: Intelligence collected on Americans, lawmakers, and figures in the pro-Israel community was fed back to the Obama White House as part of its political operations. The administration got the drop on its opponents by using classified information, which it then used to draw up its own game plan to block and freeze those on the other side. And—with the help of certain journalists whose stories (and thus careers) depend on high-level access—terrorize them.

Once you understand how this may have worked, it becomes easier to comprehend why and how we keep being fed daily treats of Trump’s nefarious Russia ties. The issue this time isn’t Israel, but Russia, yet the basic contours may very well be the same.

...What we know so far is that Obama administration officials unmasked the identity of one Trump team member, Michael Flynn, and leaked his name to the Washington Post’s David Ignatius.

...exposing Flynn’s name in the intercept for political purposes was an abuse of the national-security apparatus, and leaking it to the press is a crime.

This is familiar territory. In spying on the representatives of the American people and members of the pro-Israel community, the Obama administration learned how far it could go in manipulating the foreign-intelligence surveillance apparatus for its own domestic political advantage. In both instances, the ostensible targets—Israel and Russia—were simply instruments used to go after the real targets at home.

...The Obama administration would be less interested in what the Israelis were doing than in the actions of those who actually had the ability to block the deal—namely, Senate and House members. The administration then fed this information to members of the press, who were happy to relay thinly veiled anti-Semitic conceits by accusing deal opponents of dual loyalty and being in the pay of foreign interests.

...It didn’t take much imagination for members of Congress to imagine their names being inserted in the Iran deal echo chamber’s boilerplate—that they were beholden to “donors” and “foreign lobbies.” What would happen if the White House leaked your phone call with the Israeli ambassador to a friendly reporter, and you were then profiled as betraying the interests of your constituents and the security of your nation to a foreign power? What if the fact of your phone call appeared under the byline of a famous columnist friendly to the Obama administration, say, in a major national publication?

To make its case for the Iran Deal, the Obama administration redefined America’s pro-Israel community as agents of Israel. They did something similar with Trump and the Russians—whereby every Russian with money was defined as an agent of the state. Where the Israeli ambassador once was poison, now the Russian ambassador is the kiss of death—a phone call with him led to Flynn’s departure from the White House and a meeting with him landed Attorney General Jeff Sessions in hot water.

...The point of distributing the information so widely was to “preserve it,” the administration and its friends in the press explained—“preserve” being a euphemism for “leak.” The Obama team seems not to have understood that in proliferating that material they have exposed themselves to risk, by creating a potential criminal trail that may expose systematic abuse of foreign-intelligence collection.

Read more here.

Treason?

The Atheist Conservative reports,

Adam Kredo reports at the Washington Free Beacon:

The Obama administration has paid Iran more than $10 billion in gold, cash, and other assets since 2013, according to Iranian officials, who disclosed that the White House has been intentionally deflating the total amount paid to the Islamic Republic.

Senior Iranian officials late last week confirmed reports that the total amount of money paid to Iran over the past four years is in excess of $10 billion, a figure that runs counter to official estimates provided by the White House. The latest disclosure by Iran, which comports with previous claims about the Obama administration obfuscating details about its cash transfers to Iran — including a $1.7 billion cash payment included in a ransom to free Americans — sheds further light on the White House’s back room dealings to bolster Iran’s economy and preserve the Iran nuclear agreement.

Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Bahram Ghasemi confirmed last week a recent report in the Wall Street Journal detailing some $10 billion in cash and assets provided to Iran since 2013, when the administration was engaging in sensitive diplomacy with Tehran aimed at securing the nuclear deal. …

“This report is true but the value was higher,” Ghasemi was quoted as saying. “After the Geneva conference and the resulting agreement, it was decided that $700 million dollars were to be dispensed per month … In addition to the cash funds which we received, we received our deliveries in gold, bullion, and other things.”

Regional experts who spoke to the Free Beacon about these disclosures said that the $10 billion figure offered by the Obama administration should be viewed as “a conservative estimate for what Iran was paid to stay at the table and negotiate“. …

It is likely Iran spent a portion of this money to fund its regional terror operations and military enterprise to bolster embattled Syrian President Bashar al Assad …

One veteran foreign policy insider familiar with the administration’s outreach to Iran told the Free Beacon that the White House has a history of deflating these figures in order to obfuscate details about its contested diplomacy with the Islamic Republic.

“This is how it always happens when the Obama administration secretly sends money to Iran,” said the source … “They deny it until they’re caught, then they lowball it until they’re caught again, then they say it’s old news. In every single case where Iranian officials confirm these transfers while Obama officials denied them, it later turned out the Iranian officials were the ones telling the truth.”

“This money is going to pay for a great deal of jihad terror,” Robert Spencer comments at Jihad Watch.

In reference to the Kredo article, which he quotes, Spencer recalls the definition of Treason:

Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

And he recommends:

There ought to be an investigation into whether Obama’s actions regarding Iran, where the mullahs have ordered the people to chant “Death to America!” in the mosques every Friday, constitute treason.

Read more here.

What a mess!

The Atheist Conservative has an excellent post on the Iran deal here.

Whining and threats from Iran cleric

The Algemeiner reports,

“Now is the time for retaliation,” a senior Iranian cleric told worshippers in Tehran on Friday, following the US Senate’s unanimous approval of a ten-year extension of the Iran Sanctions Act.

Calling the move a violation of the nuclear deal reached by Iran and six world powers in July 2015, Ayatollah Mohammad Ali Movahedi-Kermani — according to the Tehran regime’s semi-official state news agency Fars — warned, “[The Americans] should know that the Islamic Republic of Iran will certainly show serious reaction against it.”

Ayatollah Muhammad Ali Movahedi-Kermani. Photo: The Iran Project.

Read more here.

Andrew McCarthy on the Iran deal

On the Iran deal, Andrew McCarthy writes,

...the Constitution is plenty strong enough to foil the ambitions of a rogue president. True, Congress cannot compel the president to execute our law faithfully. But if the president is derelict in his duty to submit an international agreement to the Senate for its approval, or to the full Congress for implementation as ordinary legislation, then the agreement will not have the force of American law. It remains a mere executive agreement between the president and other chiefs of state. That means it may be rescinded at any time, by either the president who entered it or a successor president.

the Obama administration concedes that the jihadist regime in Tehran continues to support terrorism and remains one of only three countries our government designates as state sponsors of terrorism. Indeed, the administration further admits that Tehran will divert some of the lavish money streams it got from the Iran deal to terrorist organizations. It goes without saying, moreover, that a major purpose of the deal, from Tehran’s perspective, was the preservation of Iran’s nuclear and other weapons programs.

Because the Framers were leery of foreign entanglements, they ensured that international agreements would not be legally binding unless Congress concurred in a president’s claim that they served America’s interests. Thus, to be cemented in law, such agreements must be either (a) ratified after Senate consent by a two-thirds supermajority or (b) implemented through legislation passed by both congressional chambers in the constitutional manner — i.e., enacted by simple majorities in the House and Senate.

...At first, Obama had no intention of going to Congress. Not knowing how easy it would be to roll GOP leadership, he calculated that he had no chance of getting his legacy “achievement” approved as either a treaty or legislation. Thus, the president’s original plan was to (a) make a beeline to the United Nations Security Council; (b) get its resolution endorsing the deal; (c) argue — unconstitutionally — that this U.N. resolution made the deal binding international law despite the absence of U.S. congressional assent; and (d) persuade big corporations and financial institutions to enter long-term commercial deals with Iran. This scheme was more political than legal: Change the facts on the ground so drastically that, even if the deal was not binding under federal law, other countries that wanted lucrative Iran business would revolt if the next president tried to rescind Obama’s handiwork and revive sanctions enforcement.

...But then Corker decided that, rather than steely opposition, bipartisan cooperation — with Democrats generally supportive of Obama’s Iran policy — was the way to go. With Democrats “helping” Corker write the INARA, Obama realized he’d get a windfall: not just the Security Council resolution but also congressional legislation that would effectively repeal the sanctions.

...That outcome is a disaster for U.S. national security — worse than what would have happened if Congress had done nothing. I explained why that is so when Congress failed to enact a disapproval resolution: The language of the INARA can be read to state that Congress has lifted the sanctions.

Had there been no INARA — even better, had the Republican-controlled Senate and House passed resolutions affirming the sense of each chamber that the Iran deal was a non-binding executive agreement that needed congressional approval in order to have legal effect in the United States — President Donald Trump could have, upon his inauguration, simply rescinded the deal and announced that all congressional sanctions would henceforth be fully enforced. But thanks to Corker’s INARA, it is very likely that the nuclear sanctions are dead; they’d have to be reenacted from scratch. Indeed, it is the assumption that the INARA killed the sanctions that induced big corporations to commence business with Iran — such as Boeing’s aforementioned $17.6 billion deal to supply aircraft to the “Death to America” regime.

Even in disagreement, I admire a number of these lawmakers. I also believe that Senator Corker — and other principal INARA supports, like Senators Mitch McConnell, John McCain, and Lindsey Graham — really do oppose our Iranian enemies. That’s why I spent so much time and energy pleading with them to reconsider their course. I think they just miscalculated. Some of them naively believed that, somehow, an administration more contemptuous of Congress than any in our history could be squeezed into revealing the terms of the atrocious deal. Many of them, mindful of the 2016 election then on the horizon, undoubtedly believed the political upside of hammering Democrats on Obama’s Iran policy outweighed the legal downside of allowing Obama to eradicate the sanctions.

We now also know there were secret arrangements between the Obama administration and the mullahs to forgive Iranian noncompliance regarding caps on retention of low-enriched uranium and heavy water. The administration further agreed that the IAEA would no longer provide broad reporting on Iran’s nuclear programs. And who can forget the notorious ransom? Although the INARA directed Obama to disclose all ancillary agreements to Congress, the administration concealed the arrangement by which it paid Tehran $1.7 billion in exchange for the release of four American hostages — a ransom paid in cash under the guise of settling 38-year old financial claims from a failed arms deal.

Read more here.

Essentially pleading the Fifth

Adam Kredo writes at the Free Beacon about the refusal of the Obama administration and Attorney General Lynch to cooperate with Congressional inquiries into the details of the Iran deal.

Selling the Iran deal

Ace of Spades brings us more information about how Ben Rhodes works in promulgating Obama's foreign policy.

Group ID'd as One of Ben Rhodes' "Force Multipliers" In Selling Iran Deal Also Gave $100,000 to NPR to "Help" It "Report" on the Deal
—Ace

Thanks to Melanie /‏@mrussRSF, a neat little late Friday covert news fart from the AP:

WASHINGTON (AP) — A group the White House recently identified as a key surrogate in selling the Iran nuclear deal gave National Public Radio $100,000 last year to help it report on the pact and related issues, according to the group's annual report. It also funded reporters and partnerships with other news outlets.
The Ploughshares Fund's mission is to "build a safe, secure world by developing and investing in initiatives to reduce and ultimately eliminate the world's nuclear stockpiles," one that dovetails with President Barack Obama's arms control efforts. But its behind-the-scenes role advocating for the Iran agreement got more attention this month after a candid profile of Ben Rhodes, one of the president's top foreign policy aides.

In The New York Times Magazine article, Rhodes explained how the administration worked with nongovernmental organizations, proliferation experts and even friendly reporters to build support for the seven-nation accord that curtailed Iran's nuclear activity and softened international financial penalties on Tehran.

"We created an echo chamber," said Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser, adding that "outside groups like Ploughshares" helped carry out the administration's message effectively.
...
Outside groups of all stripes are increasingly giving money to news organizations for special projects or general news coverage. Most news organizations, including The Associated Press, have strict rules governing whom they can accept money from and how to protect journalistic independence.

Ploughshares' backing is more unusual, given its prominent role in the rancorous, partisan debate over the Iran deal.
...
Ploughshares' links to media are "tremendously troubling," said Rep. Mike Pompeo of Kansas, an Iran-deal critic.

Pompeo told the AP he repeatedly asked NPR to be interviewed last year as a counterweight to a Democratic supporter of the agreement, Rep. Adam Schiff of California, who he said regularly appeared on the station. But NPR refused to put Pompeo on the air, he said. The station said it had no record of Pompeo's requests, and listed several prominent Republicans who were featured speaking about the deal or economic sanctions on Iran.

Another who appeared on NPR is Joseph Cirincione, Ploughshares' president.
Well isn't that cozy.

A victory lap

Ben Rhodes is President Barack Obama's deputy national security adviser for strategic communications. So why did Ben Rhodes attack allies in the media who helped the White House push through Obama's signature foreign policy accomplishment? Lee Smith writes at The Weekly Standard

For the same reason that anonymous White House officials called the prime minister of Israel "chickenshit." For the same reason that Obama called American partners "free riders." For the same reason Obama shamed the leaders of two of America's closest allies, France and the United Kingdom, in public. Because that's what this president and this White House is about, humiliating allies and friends. Why would it treat its own Iran Deal echo chamber any better?

...Lots of people don't know why the administration let Rhodes pull back the curtain. Because the White House won the Iran Deal is why. They wanted to take a victory lap.

Read more here.

Who profits from the Iran deal?

Andrew McCarthy wrote this piece at National Review a couple of weeks ago:

‘Why on earth would Republicans do that?” That is a question I’ve been asked at least a dozen times since illustrating that the GOP has played a cynical game in connection with President Obama’s Iran deal.

“Follow the money” is a common answer to questions about political motivation. It may not explain everything in this case, but it is certainly relevant.

This spring, Republican leadership colluded with the White House and congressional Democrats to enact a law — the Corker-Cardin Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act — that guaranteed Obama would be authorized to lift sanctions against Iran (the main objective of the terrorist regime in Tehran). The rigged law authorized Obama to lift sanctions as long as Republicans could not pass a resolution of disapproval. As Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, House Speaker John Boehner, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker, and other GOP leaders well knew, there was no way they would ever be able to enact a disapproval resolution over Obama’s veto. But the process choreographed by Corker-Cardin meant they would be able to complain about the deal and vote to disapprove it — thereby creating the impression that they were staunchly against the lifting of sanctions that they had already authorized.

Often in Washington, the numbers that matter are measured in dollars, not votes.

Take Boeing, for example.

Based in Chicago, Boeing is the world’s largest aerospace company, with revenues expected to surge past $96 billion this year. It is a major GOP donor. It gives mountains of money to Democrats, too, but the lion’s share of its political contributions go to Republicans.

For the 2014 campaign cycle, according to OpenSecrets.org, the company gave about 60 percent of its whopping $3,250,000 in donations to the GOP. Major recipients included such establishment pillars as the Republican National Committee, the National Republican Congressional Committee ($38,000 each), and the National Republican Senatorial Committee ($33,000). Significant contributions were also made to McConnell ($13,000), Boehner ($25,000), Senator Lindsey Graham ($39,000), and many others. And that’s apart from the nearly $17 million the company spent in 2014 on lobbyists, 80 percent of whom have transitioned to the other end of the trough after careers in government.

It just so happens that Boeing stands to reap huge money from Obama’s lifting of the sanctions.

Iran’s airline industry has been crippled by these severe restrictions, which are aimed against commerce connected to the regime’s illegal uranium enrichment, terror promotion, and weapons trafficking. Once the sanctions are lifted, the mullahs are expected to order up at least 100 new aircraft in just the next year, and 400 over the next decade. That means tens of billions of dollars in sales for manufacturers positioned to satisfy those pressing needs.

No company is better positioned than Boeing. It not only has the models Iran wants and the production capacity to fill huge orders. Boeing also ingratiated itself with the mullahs last year by leaping into action when President Obama, eager to keep Iran at the negotiating table, granted some limited sanctions relief. Reuters reported that the company “sold aircraft manuals, drawings, charts and data to Iran Air.”

Interesting thing about that: Iran Air, the national carrier, is most notorious for providing material support to the barbaric Assad regime in Syria and the Hezbollah terrorist network that props it up.

As detailed earlier this week in an important report by Emanuele Ottolenghi and Ben Weinthal of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (published by Politico’s European edition), the U.S. Treasury Department designated Iran Air as a proliferator of weapons of mass destruction in 2011, ordering the freezing of its assets. Serving as an arm of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps (the force principally responsible for killing hundreds of American troops in Iraq and 19 American airmen in the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia), Iran Air transported rockets and missiles, as well as military personnel and weapons, to Syria. It also violated a U.N. arms embargo by sending along dual-use materials that can be converted to military applications.

Oh . . . and given that Obama’s Iran deal depends on the terrorist regime’s good-faith cooperation with inspectors and compliance with restrictions on its nuclear work, it is probably worth mentioning how Iran Air managed to carry out its WMD proliferation: as Messrs. Ottolenghi and Weinthal explain, it systematically lied about the content of the cargo on its flights. Nevertheless, in the implementation of the Iran deal approved by Corker-Cardin, Obama will be dropping the designation against Iran Air.

To sum up: Obama cuts a deal with Iran. The implementation of the deal is abetted by legislation pushed by the Republican-controlled Congress despite massive opposition from the GOP base. Under the deal, a major GOP donor stands to make billions selling aircraft to Iran. Iran will use the aircraft to fortify the Assad regime (which Obama and GOP leadership claim to want to topple) and to promote terrorism by networks with a history of murdering Americans.

Read more here.

How to stop the Iran deal

Dick Morris has a couple of ideas about how to stop the Iran deal. Watch his brief video here.

What a deal!

h/t American Digest