The Election Is Already Making A Difference In How We Deal With Iran

According to The Daily Signal, on Thursday the House Republicans passed a bill blocking the sale of aircraft to Iran.

The article reports:

The House voted 243 to 174 to pass legislation sponsored by Rep. Bill Huizenga, R-Mich., prohibiting the secretary of the Treasury from authorizing a transaction from a U.S. bank or financial institution related to the export of aircraft to Iran.

The White House said it would veto the bill, as it could be viewed as a violation of the Iran nuclear deal.

In September, the Treasury issued licenses to aviation giants Airbus and Boeing that permitted the sale of planes to Iran Air, the country’s state-owned airline. The agency also allowed U.S. banks to finance the sale of those aircraft to Tehran.

“This bill would keep Americans’ deposits away from a country that the president’s own State Department calls ‘the foremost state sponsor of terrorism,’ and which Treasury has designed as a ‘jurisdiction of primary money laundering concern,’” Huizenga said today on the House floor.

The legislation also prohibits the Export-Import Bank, or Ex-Im, from providing any assistance either directly or indirectly to Iran and associated entities, including its state-run airline.

Ex-Im provides taxpayer-backed loans and loan guarantees to foreign countries and companies for the purchase of U.S. products.

“We need to make sure that the American financial system is not complicit in this [Iran nuclear] deal,” Rep. Peter Roskam, R-Ill., said on the House floor Thursday. “We need to make sure American taxpayers are not subsidizing this deal.”

The article explains why selling aircraft to Iran is not a good idea:

The company’s deal marked the first time since the Islamic Revolution in 1979 that American aircraft were sold to Tehran.

The Obama administration previously sanctioned Iran Air after the airline used passenger and cargo planes to fly rockets and missiles to Syria and other nations. The weapons were sometimes disguised as medicine or spare parts, according to past reports.

Under the Iran nuclear deal, the Obama administration dropped economic sanctions against Tehran.

I believe that the Iran treaty will be one of the first things to go under a Trump Administration. The treaty is not a good deal for anyone–it simply allows Iran to develop nuclear weapons a few years later than the Iranian government originally had in mind. It is also obvious by the behavior of Iran since the treaty that their hostility toward America has not decreased. I suspect that one of the reasons the House of Representative allowed the treaty to stand was that the airline manufacturers made large campaign contributions to key Representatives. That is the kind of behavior that needs to go away as soon as possible.