While We Weren’t Paying Attention…

While most Americans have been watching the political theater at home, the Biden administration has been continuing negotiations on an Iran deal supposedly to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.

On Thursday, The Patriot Daily Wire reported:

Mossad Director David Barnea called the new nuclear deal negotiated between Iran and the West “a strategic disaster” that is “very bad for Israel” on Thursday, The Times of Israel reported.

Barnea emphasized that the emerging deal, mainly resulting from talks between Iran and the United States, is “ultimately built on lies” as he implored international leaders not to rush into signing on.

The Israeli intelligence leader said of the possibility that Iran obtains nuclear weapons that Mossad “is preparing and knows how to remove that threat.”

“If we don’t take action, Israel will be in danger,” he added.

Barnea’s strong statement comes as the U.S. and Iran inch close to implementing a form of the original Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) passed under former U.S. President Barack Obama.

European Union Foreign Policy Chief Josep Borrell recently said that the U.S. could respond as soon as this week to a final draft proposal that would restore a form of the 2015 JCPOA accord.

“I hope that this response allows us to end the negotiations,” Borrell declared. “That’s my hope, but I cannot assure you that this will happen.”

U.S. State Department spokesman Ned Price signaled similar optimism to the E.U. on Monday but acknowledged that “there are still some outstanding issues that must be resolved.”

Israel is our strongest and most loyal ally in the Middle East. They are also the best informed as to what is actually going on with Iran’s nuclear program. It is well-known that Iran is the major fund source for terrorism around the world. A nuclear deal that gives them billions of dollars will help fund that terrorism as well as help fund their nuclear research. Any deal with Iran will probably be broken by Iran secretly or openly, and we will find out about it when they announce that they have a nuclear bomb and a delivery system or when they demonstrate that bomb by destroying Israel.

There are two principles that need to be considered when negotiating with Iran, which is a Muslim caliphate. The first is taqiyya, which essentially means that it is okay to lie to advance the cause of Islam. Remember that the goal of Iran is to recreate the former caliphate that was the Ottoman Empire. The second is hudna. Basically hudna is a cease fire called by an Islamic entity to give that entity time to rearm or gain some advantage. Both of these principles are in play in our current negotiations with Iran.
Our State Department is either ignorant of these principles or is choosing to ignore them. Neither should be acceptable to Americans.

 

 

Killing Our Own Soldiers With Taxpayer Money

On June 9, Bloomberg.com posted an article about one unfortunate result of President Obama’s treaty with Iran.

In January, the U.S. Treasury transferred $1.7 billion to Iran’s Central Bank. Last month Iran’s Guardian Council approved an Iranian 2017 budget that instructed Iran’s Central Bank to transfer the $1.7 to the military.

The article reports:

Saeed Ghasseminejad, an associate fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, spotted the budget item. He told me the development was widely reported in Iran by numerous sources including the state-funded news services. “Article 22 of the budget for 2017 says the Central Bank is required to give the money from the legal settlement of Iran’s pre- and post-revolutionary arms sales of up to $1.7 billion to the defense budget,” he said. 

Republicans and some Democrats who opposed Obama’s nuclear deal have argued that the end of some sanctions would help to fund Iran’s military. But at least that was Iran’s money already (albeit frozen in overseas bank accounts). The $1.7 billion that Treasury transferred to Iran in January is different.

A portion of it, $400 million, came from a trust fund comprising money paid by the government of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, a U.S. ally, for arms sold to Iran before the 1979 revolution. Those sales were cut off in 1979 after revolutionaries took over the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and held the American staff hostage for 444 days. The remaining $1.3 billion represents interest on the $400 million principle over more than 36 years.

The article notes that we are already subsidizing defense spending for Egypt and Israel. Essentially we are supplying money for arms to both sides in the Middle East. How does this ever lead to peace? Anyone who understands the Middle East also knows that at least some of this money will be used against U.S. soldiers. Why are we funding the enemy that is killing our soldiers?

The article concludes:

The irony here is that Iran has been pleading poverty in recent months. The country’s supreme leader and foreign minister have publicly complained that Iran’s economy has not seen the benefits expected from the Iran nuclear deal. And yet Iran’s 2017 $19 billion defense budget has increased by 90 percent from 2016, according to Ghasseminejad.

We now know where $1.7 billion of that came from.

This Would Be So Much Easier If We Would Just Get Back To Basics

Andrew McCarthy posted an article at the National Review today about the recently announced nuclear treaty with Iran. Yes, it is a treaty.

This is the lead paragraph from the article:

It is time to end the Kabuki theater. The Corker Bill and its ballyhooed 60-day review process that undermines the Constitution is a sideshow. If you scrutinize President Obama’s Iran nuclear deal, you find that the president ignores the existence of the Corker process. So should Congress.

So what does the U.S. Constitution say about treaties?

“The President… shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur….

ARTICLE II, SECTION 2, CLAUSE 2

The deal with Iran is a treaty. It needs to be treated as such.

The article further reports:

Obama’s Iran deal also ignores the existence of Congress itself – at least, of the United States Congress. As I’ve previously detailed (piggy-backing on characteristically perceptive analysis by AEI’s Fred Kagan), the deal does expressly defer to the Iranian Congress, conceding that key Iranian duties are merely provisional until the jihadist regime’s parliament, the Majlis, has an opportunity to review them as required by Iran’s sharia constitution. The United States Constitution, however, is a nullity in the eyes and actions of this imperial White House.

There is no way America should ever defer to any other constitution, much less one subject to Sharia Law.

Let’s get back to the guidelines set forth in the U.S. Constitution, which is supposed to be the ‘supreme law of the land’ in America. It is time we got acquainted with what it says and got back to following it.

Please read the entire article. It contains a few very good suggestions on how Congress can limit the damage that will be caused by the current nuclear deal with Iran. The question is whether or not Congress will have the backbone to stand up for America.