Tag Archives: Iran Treaty

Why Are We Still In The United Nations?

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The Preamble of the United Nations Charter states:

WE THE PEOPLES OF THE UNITED NATIONS DETERMINED

  • to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and
  • to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small, and
  • to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained, and
  • to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom,

That sounds really good. Unfortunately, they have fallen considerably short.

On August 22, CNS News posted an article about a recent statement by Idriss Jazairy, an Algerian national, is the Executive Director of the Geneva Centre for Human Rights Advancement and Global Dialogue. He has described the leveling of sanctions on Iran by the United States as “unjust and harmful.”

The article reports:

Idriss Jazairy noted that the U.S. itself – during the Obama administration – had supported the U.N. Security Council resolution which unanimously endorsed the nuclear deal known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).

That underscored the illegitimacy of President Trump’s restoration of sanctions following his decision this year to exit the JCPOA, he said.

Jazairy pointed out that the other permanent members of the Security Council – as well as “all international partners” – were opposed to the U.S. move.

“International sanctions must have a lawful purpose, must be proportional, and must not harm the human rights of ordinary citizens, and none of these criteria is met in this case.”

The article further reports:

Jazairy’s appointment as “special rapporteur on the negative impact of the unilateral coercive measures on the enjoyment of human rights” was controversial not just because of the mandate itself, but because of his own record.

Until 2012 he had served as Algeria’s ambassador to the HRC, representing a government that is designated “not free” by the democracy watchdog, Freedom House.

In that capacity, he led African opposition a decade ago to taking a tough stance towards Sudan’s Islamist regime over the deadly humanitarian crisis in Darfur. (Wearing his later special rapporteur hat, Jazairy blamed the suffering of Sudanese people on U.S. sanctions, rather than on the regime, whose leader is wanted by the International Criminal Court on charges of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.)

Jazairy has accused Israel of international piracy (after the 2010 Israeli commando raid on a Turkish ship carrying pro-Palestinian activists to Gaza) and praised Libya’s Gaddafi regime in 2010 for its efforts “to promote human rights.”

What about the rights of women in Iran? What about the ‘fashion police’ in Iran who literally beat up women they think are not dressed appropriately? What about free speech in Iran? What about Iran’s violations of the Iran treaty?

It truly is time to leave the United Nations. The building in New York City, after some major repairs, would make wonderful upscale condos that would pay real estate taxes to the City. The lower levels of the UN building could be turned into parking garages, and all diplomats who have not paid their parking tickets could be deported. It would be wonderful.

Unfortunately This Is Actually Plausable

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The Washington Times posted an opinion piece today about President Obama. The title of the opinion piece is “America really did have a Manchurian Candidate in the White House.” The piece lists some of the actions of the Obama administration that weakened America and caused discord around the world.

The piece notes:

After returning from a tour of some of the war zones in the Middle East — which ended with the Free Iran Gathering 2018 in Paris — I am struck by the realization that America really did have a Manchurian Candidate in The White House for eight years. If you look at the evidence, there really is no other conclusion. The calamitous consequences of the Obama presidency will be felt for the foreseeable future.

In the short year and a half that President Trump has been in office, he has put in place policy that has mitigated the damage that President Obama inflicted on our national security and on our allies. The speed with which Trump has been able to turn things around points to the diabolical depths the Obama administration went to in order to undermine our national strength and way of life. All Trump had to do was stop doing things that hurt America; America could then take care of itself. The results are plain as day. However, it will take decades for the Obama damage to be completely undone. The deviousness of the Obama sedition runs deep.

Some examples cited were the support of an Egyptian President with ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, the ousting of Moammar Gadhafi, who had given up his nuclear weapons, the premature withdrawal of American troops from Iraq, and the Iran treaty. Any one of these policies could be viewed individually as bad judgment, but when you look at all of these decisions together, there is a pattern. All of these policy decisions weakened America and made the world less safe. It is extremely doubtful that was simply a coincidence.

Please follow the link above to read the entire piece.

Actually, This Is The Way It Was Supposed To Be Done In The First Place

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According to the U.S. Constitution, the Senate has the responsibility of advice and consent regarding 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… Constitution of the United States, Art. II, Sec. 2

The Senate never voted on the Iran Nuclear Treaty. President Trump has now “decertified” his support for the agreement and left its fate in the hands of Congress.

Yahoo News is reporting today:

And, outlining the results of a review of efforts to counter Tehran’s “aggression” in a series of Middle East conflicts, Trump ordered tougher sanctions on Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps and on its ballistic missile program.

Trump said the agreement, which defenders say was only ever meant to curtail Iran’s nuclear program in return for sanctions relief, had failed to address Iranian subversion in its region and its illegal missile program.

The US president said he supports efforts in Congress to work on new measures to address these threats without immediately torpedoing the broader deal.

“However, in the event we are not able to reach a solution working with Congress and our allies, then the agreement will be terminated,” Trump said, in a televised address from the Diplomatic Room of the White House.

“It is under continuous review and our participation can be canceled by me as president at any time,” he warned.

Simultaneously, the US Treasury said it had taken action against the Islamic Revolutionary Guards under a 2001 executive order to hit sources of terror funding and added four companies that allegedly support the group to its sanctions list.

Any business done with Iran is done under the auspices of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard. It is a safe guess to say that any money Iran earns in international trade will be spent on its military and its support of terrorism throughout the world.

On May 10, 2016, I posted an article about the role that Ben Rhodes played in selling the Iran Treaty to the American public.In his statements to the New York Times, Mr. Rhodes was described as follows:

Like Obama, Rhodes is a storyteller who uses a writer’s tools to advance an agenda that is packaged as politics but is often quite personal. He is adept at constructing overarching plotlines with heroes and villains, their conflicts and motivations supported by flurries of carefully chosen adjectives, quotations and leaks from named and unnamed senior officials. He is the master shaper and retailer of Obama’s foreign-policy narratives, at a time when the killer wave of social media has washed away the sand castles of the traditional press. His ability to navigate and shape this new environment makes him a more effective and powerful extension of the president’s will than any number of policy advisers or diplomats or spies. His lack of conventional real-world experience of the kind that normally precedes responsibility for the fate of nations — like military or diplomatic service, or even a master’s degree in international relations, rather than creative writing — is still startling.

The Iran Treaty was based on the lie that Iran would give up its aggressive tendencies and its search for nuclear weapons. There is no evidence that either one of those things has happened. Ending the Iran Treaty and renewing the economic sanctions would be a step toward peace in the Middle East.

More Truth Comes Out

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Even what we knew about the Iran deal at the time was questionable at best, but it keeps getting worse. Yesterday Politico posted an article about one aspect of the deal that somehow wasn’t covered by the press at the time.

The article reports:

When President Barack Obama announced the “one-time gesture” of releasing Iranian-born prisoners who “were not charged with terrorism or any violent offenses” last year, his administration presented the move as a modest trade-off for the greater good of the Iran nuclear agreement and Tehran’s pledge to free five Americans.

“Iran had a significantly higher number of individuals, of course, at the beginning of this negotiation that they would have liked to have seen released,” one senior Obama administration official told reporters in a background briefing arranged by the White House, adding that “we were able to winnow that down to these seven individuals, six of whom are Iranian-Americans.”

Sounds pretty innocent. But wait–there’s more to the story. Although President Obama described the seven as civilians, that is not actually true.

The article further reports:

But Obama, the senior official and other administration representatives weren’t telling the whole story on Jan. 17, 2016, in their highly choreographed rollout of the prisoner swap and simultaneous implementation of the six-party nuclear deal, according to a POLITICO investigation.

In his Sunday morning address to the American people, Obama portrayed the seven men he freed as “civilians.” The senior official described them as businessmen convicted of or awaiting trial for mere “sanctions-related offenses, violations of the trade embargo.”

In reality, some of them were accused by Obama’s own Justice Department of posing threats to national security. Three allegedly were part of an illegal procurement network supplying Iran with U.S.-made microelectronics with applications in surface-to-air and cruise missiles like the kind Tehran test-fired recently, prompting a still-escalating exchange of threats with the Trump administration. Another was serving an eight-year sentence for conspiring to supply Iran with satellite technology and hardware. As part of the deal, U.S. officials even dropped their demand for $10 million that a jury said the aerospace engineer illegally received from Tehran.

Why in the world was President Obama so desperate to make a deal with Iran?

Please follow the link above to the Politico article. It is a rather lengthy article, but has a lot of insight into the difficulties created by President Obama’s Iran treaty. The treaty not only will allow Iran to obtain a nuclear weapon in the near future (think North Korea). The treaty also creates immediate security and safety issues for American troops in the Middle East because of the large amounts of untraceable cash sent to Iran. That money can be used to support worldwide terrorism or to fund actions against American troops.

We need to scrap the treaty and put the sanctions back!

The Iran Deal Just Gets Uglier

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The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday:

The Obama administration agreed to back the lifting of United Nations sanctions on two Iranian state banks blacklisted for financing Iran’s ballistic-missile program on the same day in January that Tehran released four American citizens from prison, according to U.S. officials and congressional staff briefed on the deliberations.

The U.N. sanctions on the two banks weren’t initially to be lifted until 2023, under a landmark nuclear agreement between Iran and world powers that went into effect on Jan. 16.

The U.N. Security Council’s delisting of the two banks, Bank Sepah and Bank Sepah International, was part of a package of tightly scripted agreements—the others were a controversial prisoner swap and transfer of $1.7 billion in cash to Iran—that were finalized between the U.S. and Iran on Jan. 17, the day the Americans were freed.

If the Iran nuclear deal is such a wonder thing, why has so much of it been kept secret?

The Middle East was in relatively good shape when President Obama took office. Hillary Clinton was his Secretary of State. Eight years later, where are we? In 2011 we saw the birth of the ‘Arab Spring’ which was supposed to democratize the Middle East. The Arab Spring brought the Muslim Brotherhood to power in Egypt, destabilized Libya, and eventually led to the civil war in Syria. Egypt (with no help from the Obama Administration) was able to wrestle its country back from the Muslim Brotherhood and install leadership that will fight the Muslim Brotherhood and terrorism. It’s far from a democracy, but it is keeping peace within the country and working to stop terrorism. I am not impressed with the Obama Administration’s foreign policy under the leadership of Secretary of State Clinton. We have consistently worked against freedom, and we have funded terrorism by giving money to Iran.

Please follow the link above to read the entire Wall Street Journal article. The foreign policy of the Obama Administration has been a nightmare for America. Electing Hillary Clinton as President will give us more of the same.

Irony?

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Last Tuesday I wrote an article about the New York Times interview by Ben Rhodes. The Sunday New York Times Magazine featured a rather lengthy interview with Mr. Rhodes. In the interview, Ben Rhodes essentially brags about taking advantage of the ignorance of young White House reporters in spinning the Iran nuclear deal.

The New York Times article quotes Ben Rhodes:

Rhodes singled out a key example to me one day, laced with the brutal contempt that is a hallmark of his private utterances. “All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus,” he said. “Now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”

Well, Congress asked Mr. Rhodes to testify about the Iran nuclear deal and his actions in selling it. Mr. Rhodes (and President Obama) were not interested in talking to an audience that might be less than friendly and that might actually be seeking the truth.

Fox News posted a story today about Mr. Rhodes’ refusal to testify.

The article states:

Chaffetz, R-Utah, chairman of the House Oversight Committee, wanted the deputy national security adviser to testify at a hearing set for Tuesday titled, “White House narratives on the Iran Nuclear Deal.”

“We’re planning as if he is attending, and he’ll have a comfortable seat awaiting his arrival,” Chaffetz said Monday afternoon of Rhodes.

But W. Neil Eggleston, White House counsel, sent a letter to Chaffetz late Monday saying Rhodes would not attend.

He cited what appeared to be an executive privilege-related claim, asserting that such a senior presidential adviser’s appearance “threatens the independence and autonomy of the President, as well as his ability to receive candid advice and counsel.” For those reasons, he said, “we will not make Mr. Rhodes available to testify.”

Chaffetz earlier had made a last-ditch attempt to pressure Rhodes into appearing. After White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest initially said he should invite GOP Sen. Tom Cotton, whom he accuses of spreading false information about the deal, Chaffetz did exactly that — inviting Cotton to testify, on condition that Rhodes appeared as well.

“[Earnest] suggested that you should be invited to appear at the hearing as well, because you have some ‘interesting insight’ into the JCPOA [the Iran deal]. Therefore your appearance before the Committee would be contingent on Mr. Rhodes’ appearance at that hearing,” Chaffetz said in a letter Friday.

It seems very ironic to me that Mr. Rhodes is willing to tell all to The New York Times but not willing to talk to Congress.

The article at Fox News explains why Congress requested Mr. Rhodes to appear:

Sources tell Fox News that the committee was keen for Rhodes to appear voluntarily so they avoid the territory of a possible subpoena.

The magazine article that touched off the controversy outlined how Rhodes created a narrative of the deal coming out of the 2013 election of “moderate” Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and Iran’s subsequent “openness” and willingness to negotiate.

In fact, the story stated, the majority of the deal was hammered out in 2012, well before Rouhani’s election. However, the Rhodes narrative was politically useful to the administration as it presented them as reaching out to the moderates who wanted peace.

Congress needs to hold the President (and his ‘truth-spinner’) accountable for the lies that were told to gain acceptance of a treaty that will eventually be a threat to America‘s national security. It is very telling to me that Ben Rhodes was willing to spend as many hours as it took to get his interview in The New York Times but is not willing to talk to Congress.