Tag Archives: Iran’s Revolutionary Guard

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.

The Cost Of Inaction

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NBC News is reporting today that President Obama stopped the CIA from executing a plan to remove Syrian President Bashar Assad from power in 2012. The President’s reluctance to do anything to end the Syrian Revolution had serious consequences–the rise of ISIS.

The article reports:

It’s long been known that then-CIA Director David Petraeus recommended a program to secretly arm and train moderate Syrian rebels in 2012 to pressure Assad. But a book to be published Tuesday by a former CIA operative goes further, revealing that senior CIA officials were pushing a multi-tiered plan to engineer the dictator’s ouster. Former American officials involved in the discussions confirmed that to NBC News.

In an exclusive television interview with NBC News, the former officer, Doug Laux, describes spending a year in the Middle East meeting with Syrian rebels and intelligence officers from various partner countries. Laux, who spoke some Arabic, was the eyes and ears on the ground for the CIA’s Syria task force, he says.

The article noted that the President, who must approve all covert operations, never approved the action.

The article further reports:

Petraeus and others who supported the plan believe it could have prevented the rise of ISIS, Assad’s use of chemical weapons, the European refugee crisis and the tens of thousands of civilian deaths that have happened since, the former officials say. President Obama and many other analysts strongly disagree.

Elements under discussion at the time included not only bolstering Syrian rebels, but pressuring and paying senior members of Assad’s regime to push him out, the former officials said. The idea was that the Syrian civil war could then have been peacefully resolved–a huge uncertainty.

Laux ultimately resigned in frustration — over that and other issues — after it became clear the Obama administration would not move forward.

…But former senior U.S. officials point out that the Lebanon-based terror group Hezbollah, and Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, had not yet begun fighting in Syria in significant numbers in 2012. Many players in the region, they say, were waiting to see what the United States would do.

Interfering in civil wars in foreign countries is risky. Libya did not turn out well, and initially Egypt did not turn out well. However, in the case of Syria, not getting involved probably created more problems than it solved.

Part of the problem here is the cultural differences between western culture and the Middle East. The Middle Eastern culture has very little respect for anything but force. President Obama’s lack of action was seen as weakness and viewed as something to be taken advantage of. Unless America elects a leader who is viewed as strong by our enemies, we can expect the problem of ISIS and Hezbollah to grow. We shouldn’t be sending our troops overseas at every moment, but we need to project enough strength to prevent nations and groups that are less than friendly to us from taking advantage of perceived weakness.

This Really Won’t Help Me Sleep Nights

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I have posted articles by Reza Kahlili before.

The Daily Caller describes him as follows:

Reza Kahlili is a pseudonym for a former CIA operative in Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and the author of the award winning book, A Time to Betray. He is a senior Fellow with EMPact America, a member of the Task Force on National and Homeland Security and teaches at the U.S. Department of Defense’s Joint Counterintelligence Training Academy (JCITA).

His latest article at the Daily Caller should wake up all Americans (including Congress) to the dangers around us: 

A source who served in the Revolutionary Guards’ intelligence unit and has now defected to a European country warned in April that the Islamic regime’s terror cells were on high alert, which includes for attacks in the U.S.

According to that source, and another located in the U.S., the regime’s assets have long infiltrated America and are coordinating operations out of mosques and Islamic centers, such as Imam Ali Mosques and the Iman Islamic Center.

Please read the entire article at the Daily Caller. I also recommend reading an article posted by Andrew McCarthy at PJ Media today talking about the willful blindness of our Congress in regard to the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood in America. He tells his story regarding his research into the Muslim Brotherhood and its influence on American politics beginning with his prosecution of Omar Abdel-Rahman (the Blind Sheik) in 1996.

Mr. McCarthy is questioning whether it is time for conservatives who care about national security to abandon the Republican party.

He concludes:

At a time not long ago, before the hard Left took over the Democratic Party, there was a style of strong national-security Democrat (in the mold of Scoop Jackson or even Jack Kennedy) who would have seen the position to which the Obama administration and the Republican establishment adhere as dangerously delusional. Unfortunately, there are no longer enough of those Democrats in government to appeal to.

On the other hand, there remain many national security conservatives in the Republican Party. They are alarmed and extremely worried about the threat the ascendancy of Islamic supremacism poses to our liberty and security. They also see this threat magnified, to an intolerable degree, by the inroads the Muslim Brotherhood has made in the Republican establishment and in our government. As to the latter, we are not just talking about the State Department — not by a long shot. So profound is the influence of the Obama/Republican-establishment philosophy over the Defense Department, for example, that the Pentagon could not bring itself to refer to any aspect of Islamic supremacist ideology in a lengthy report on the attack at Fort Hood — a jihadist atrocity that killed 13 Americans, twice as many as were killed in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

If the Republican Party has decided to take its cues from establishment proponents of this reckless philosophy, if GOP leaders can no longer tell the difference between hostile anti-American operatives and benign political actors, then the Republican Party has become an obstacle to liberty and security, not a vehicle for their preservation. As is the case with crushing government debt and out-of-control government spending, it appears that the GOP is choosing to be part of the problem, rather than the solution, when it comes to the threat of Islamic supremacism. Certainly, that is a choice party leaders are entitled to make. But if it is the one they have made, why should conservatives concerned about liberty and security bother with the Republican Party?

This is a time to be aware of the connections of our government officials. Michele Bachmann has asked for an investigation into some of those officials. This is not a witch hunt–this is a necessary endeavor.