FDD President Clifford May discusses Iran’s naval confrontation and nuclear negotiations.
All views are attributable only to the author. We encourage discussion of the viewpoints expressed by the author.
FDD President Clifford May discusses Iran’s naval confrontation and nuclear negotiations.
All views are attributable only to the author. We encourage discussion of the viewpoints expressed by the author.
Congress is poised to decide whether to re-authorize programs run by the National Security Agency that assess patterns of domestic and international telephone calls and emails to uncover linkages with known terrorists. These NSA activities, initiated after al-Qaeda’s deadly 9/11 attacks, have played a vital role in protecting America and our citizens around the world from the still-metastasizing terrorist threat.
The NSA programs do not involve listening to or reading conversations, but rather seek to detect communications networks. If patterns are found, and more detailed investigation seems warranted, then NSA or other federal authorities, consistent with the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition against unreasonable searches and seizures, must obtain judicial approval for?more specific investigations. Indeed, even the collection of the so-called metadata is surrounded by procedural protections to prevent spying on U.S. citizens.
Nonetheless, critics from the right and left have attacked the NSA for infringing on the legitimate expectations of privacy Americans enjoy under our Constitution. Unfortunately, many of these critics have absolutely no idea what they are talking about; they are engaging in classic McCarthyite tactics, hoping to score political points with a public justifiably worried about the abuses of power characteristic of the Obama administration. Other critics, following Vietnam-era antipathies to America’s intelligence community, have never reconciled themselves to the need for robust clandestine capabilities. Still others yearn for simpler times, embodying Secretary of State Henry Stimson’s famous comment that “gentlemen don’t read each others’ mail.”
The ill-informed nature of the debate has facilitated scare-mongering, with one wild accusation about NSA’s activities after another being launched before the mundane reality catches up. And there is an important asymmetry at work here as well. The critics can say whatever their imaginations conjure up, but NSA and its defenders are significantly limited in how they can respond. By definition, the programs’ success rests on the secrecy fundamental to all intelligence activities. Frequently, therefore, explaining what is not happening could well reveal information about NSA’s methods and capabilities that terrorists and others, in turn, could use to stymie future detection efforts.
After six years of President Obama, however, trust in government is in short supply. It is more than a little ironic that Obama finds himself defending the NSA (albeit with obvious hesitancy and discomfort), since his approach to foreign and defense issues has consistently reflected near-total indifference, except when he has no alternative to confronting challenges to our security. Yet if harsh international realities can penetrate even Obama’s White House, that alone is evidence of the seriousness of the threats America faces.
In fact, just in the year since Congress last considered the NSA programs, the global terrorist threat has dramatically increased. ISIS is carving out an entirely new state from what used to be Syria and Iraq, which no longer exist within the borders created from the former Ottoman Empire after World War I. In already-chaotic Libya, ISIS has grown rapidly, eclipsing al-Qaeda there and across the region as the largest terrorist threat. Boko Haram is expanding beyond Nigeria, declaring its own caliphate, even while pledging allegiance to ISIS. Yemen has descended into chaos, following Libya’s pattern, and Iran has expanded support for the terrorist Houthi coalition. Afghanistan is likely to fall back under Taliban control if, as Obama continually reaffirms, he withdraws all American troops before the end of 2016.
This is not the time to cripple our intelligence-gathering capabilities against the rising terrorist threat. Congress should unquestionably reauthorize the NSA programs, but only for three years. That would take us into a new presidency, hopefully one that inspires more confidence, where a calmer, more sensible debate can take place.
The interim agreement supposedly reached at the beginning of April gave the Iranians a great deal of concessions the U.S. had suggested were off the table. But it left a number of issues still unresolved. There was no public agreed-upon text, just fact sheets released by the respective sides, and the gaps between them are substantial.
It was unclear, for instance, whether the signing of a final deal will trigger immediate, and maybe even complete, sanctions relief. Iran said that was the plan, while the White House said sanctions should be phased out. But then, last Friday, President Obama suggested the U.S. would allow substantial immediate sanctions relief — some $50 billion worth, potentially — on the day a final deal is signed. In return, he insisted, the sanctions will be “snapped back” if Iran is caught cheating. Yet that is hardly sufficient: Russia and China are known to be wary of a snapback policy, and a punishing sanctions regime can’t be reconstructed quickly or unilaterally.
Meanwhile, the White House has said that inspectors will have unrestricted access to any sites where there is suspicious activity, but an Iranian general remarked this past weekend that no inspections will be allowed at any military base.
President Obama has a proven track record of resolving such disputes — he just gives the Iranians what they want. It is still no sure thing that the remaining gaps between our negotiators and the Iranians can be bridged, but it falls to Congress to ensure that President Obama can’t resolve them as he is accustomed. Congressmen of both parties remain skeptical of the outlined deal. The confusion over what the interim outline meant has only strengthened the case that the White House cannot be trusted with reaching a final deal, and more concessions should further worry hawkish Democrats.
So what can be done? The Senate Foreign Relations Committee has unanimously passed a bill sponsored by Senator Bob Corker that would give Congress a period in which to approve or disapprove of a final deal.
It is a weak measure — the president retains plenty of flexibility and rejecting a deal will require two-thirds of both houses — but it is better than nothing. President Obama had clearly hoped never to have to send the text of an agreement to Congress. Now, even though it looks unlikely that 13 Democrat senators will vote against a final deal, Obama does have to send it to Congress, making the terms public. That is something.
But Congress should do more — indeed, all it can to signal its disapproval of the ongoing Obama concessions and to destabilize the agreement before it can be finalized. Opponents of the drift of the negotiations should push, again, for a measure along the lines of the Kirk-Menendez legislation, which would reinstate sanctions if talks drag on. They should pass resolutions making it clear that a congressional majority disapproves of a deal that lifts sanctions immediately, or a deal that doesn’t allow for any-time, anywhere inspections, or a deal that doesn’t guarantee that enriched uranium is shipped out of Iran (which is yet another point of confusion). The time for all of this is now.
If the negotiations with Iran were not all along a dangerous farce, President Obama’s desperation for a deal has made them so. Only an agreement that dismantles Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, pushing it back from being a threshold nuclear state, is worth making. That hasn’t been on the table for months now. Congress should make clear its opposition to a deal where the terms are far, far worse, and do all it can to keep it from happening.
All views are attributable only to the author. We encourage discussion of the viewpoints expressed by the author.
All views are attributable only to the author. We encourage discussion of the viewpoints expressed by the author.
Breitbart’s Adelle Nazarian had the opportunity to speak with renowned Middle East expert and resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) Dr. Michael Rubin recently. Dr. Rubin provided his analysis on U.S.-Iran relations under the Obama Administration and provided a look into the future through the periscope of the past.
He is the author of Dancing With the Devil: The Perils of Engaging Rogue Regimes and a former Pentagon official. With a June 30 deadline for a final nuclear deal swiftly approaching, Rubin draws upon heightened concerns surrounding President Obama’s destructive handling of this most pivotal moment in international relations and national security with regard to U.S.-Iranian relations.
BREITBART NEWS: Do you think President Obama, John Kerry and the American team of negotiators were aware of how the Iranians operated?
RUBIN: No. I honestly think they were in a bubble and they were also blinded by their own personal ambition. Obama is arrogant. He thinks that all the problems with diplomacy were because of his predecessors rather than with his adversaries. Therefore, he has repeatedly gotten us into trouble with dictators and rogue regimes like Russia ad now Iran. They play the United States.
Obama is willfully naive and he doesn’t understand that evil exists in the world and that it wants to destroy the United States.
BREITBART: Considering he has former NIAC employee Sahar Nowrouzzadeh and Valerie Jarrett advising him, wouldn’t you think he would be better prepared to deal with the Iranians?
RUBIN: He surrounds himself with people who tell him what he wants to hear. But a low-level and a c-staffer is hardly someone that you could say advises the president accurately.
BREITBART: Many in the media and on the left have suggested that the conservatives see war and bombing Iran as the only option should the nuclear deal fail. What viable alternatives could you offer?
RUBIN: That’s just such nonsense and what we see is that, when it comes to diplomacy, the only people who you can trust are the conservatives. President Obama likes to credit sanctions — both United Nations sanctions and otherwise — despite the fact that he was consistently against sanctions whenever he had the chance. He’s too busy making John Bolton into a straw cartoon to recognize that John Bolton was the man who crafted the Untied Nations sanctions.
And whether it was John Bolton as under secretary of state or ambassador to the United Nations, it was Bolton who rallied the international community and gave us unanimous or near-unanimous U.N. security council resolutions that ultimately brought Iran to its knees.
BREITBART: So what do we do with Iran?
RUBIN: Economic coercion. When Hillary Clinton came into office as secretary or state she almost lectured Republicans and said, if you’re not going to talk to your enemies, who are you going to talk to? And she cited Ronald Reagan who sat down with Mikhail Gorbachev to end the Cold War. But she didn’t understand the importance of leverage to Reagan.
Reagan had prefaced his diplomacy with Gorbachev with a military buildup in order to negotiate from a position of strength. In order to bring Iran to the table and have them adhere to their international agreements, you have to maximize your leverage. Obama agreed to give Iran $11.9 billion in sanctions relief in unfrozen assets just to sit at the table and talk to the American team.
To put this in perspective, the annual, official budget of the Revolutionary Guard is about $5.6 billion. In order to get the Iranians to sit at the table, Obama gave Iran enough money to pay the salaries of a group responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Americans for two years.
BREITBART: It has been suggested that up to $150 billion in frozen Iranian assets could be released to the Iranian regime. Would this guarantee the regime’s longevity?
RUBIN: Yes. The Soviet Union ultimately fell due to an unstable economy. The analogy would be that, instead of bankrupting the Soviet Union, Ronald Reagan decided to flood them with cash. What Obama is doing with the potential release of those funds, is taking a hateful, racist regime and throwing it a lifeline.
The IRGC dominates the Iranian economy. The revolutionary foundation and what’s called Khatam al-Andia control perhaps 40% of Iran’s economy, including anything involved with import and export. So rather than allowing reformism to flourish inside of Iran, the net impact of the rush to do business inside Iran and to bring Iranian oil into the market will be to empower the Revolutionary Guard even further. It would allow them to consolidate control.
The IRGC is involved with the military aspects of the nuclear program, which of course aren’t included in this framework yet. And they are also in charge of export of revolution. And we see that this isn’t mere rhetoric when we look at what is happening in Gaza and Yemen. Simply put, if Obama and his national security team were to sit down and ask themselves what a strategy to enable Iran’s destabilizing influence in the Middle East would look like– I hate to say it, but it would not look any different from the strategy they are now pursuing.
BREITBART: What are the Iranian mullah’s plans in the region? Now that not only Tehran but Beirut, Damascus, Baghdad and even Sanaa are under their control, what is their ultimate goal?
RUBIN: This is something else Obama simply doesn’t understand or he ignores. Iran is not a status quo state. It is an ideological revisionist state. Its goal is to export revolution. Ordinary Iranians may not subscribe to this, but in any dictatorship it’s the guys with the guns that matter. And in this case, the Iranians used to describe themselves as a regional power. Then about four years ago, they began describing themselves as a pan-regional power, meaning the Persian Gulf and the North Indian Ocean.
Well, this past November they started talking about themselves in terms of having strategic boundaries in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Gulf of Aden. And again, we see that this wasn’t mere rhetoric when we look at the weapons shipments to Syria and to Hamas. And when we look at Iranian activities in Yemen.
BREITBART: Is it then safe to say that Iran’s goal is not very different from the goal of ISIS, which is to establish an Islamic Caliphate and regional hegemony, except that they have two different fundamental Islamic ideologies?
RUBIN: Correct.
BREITBART: What do you think will happen when Khamenei passes away?
RUBIN: We only have one example of this happening before and that was when Khomeini died. On paper, you have an 86-member particle body called the Assembly of Experts which decides who replaces him. In reality, from 1989 we know thats not the case. What happened in 1989 with Khomeini’s death was that all the power centers got together and basically came to a consensus. That consensus was Khamenei.
Now who that consensus figure will be, I don’t know. But it is possible to have a council. And that is the Iranian way of kicking the can down the road. But this is what concerns me; and this is also where Obama’s outreach is so short-sighted. Any strategy which empowers the Revolutionary Guard gives the Revolutionary Guard additional powers to impose its will as the next choice. After all, if they’re powerful, they’re not going to subordinate themselves to someone with whom they disagree.
The important thing about this is you have a cycle of radicalization in which the supreme leader picks the most radical, ideologically pure officers to staff the highest levels of the Revolutionary Guard. Those same officers then have predominant influence in choosing the next supreme leader. And so President Obama is not only pursuing a deal which is bad for the United States and Iranians in the short term. He is pursuing a deal which is going to perpetuate this radicalization for at least another generation or two.
All views are attributable only to the author. We encourage discussion of the viewpoints expressed by the author.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s call for a “Muslim Reformation”
By now, you should be familiar with the name Ayaan Hirsi Ali. You should know at least this much about her: She is brilliant, beautiful, black and she has been banned near Boston.
You might also have learned that she was born in Somali and raised as a devout Muslim in Africa and Saudi Arabia. While a teenager, she joined the Muslim Brotherhood, “believed in jihad” and was “ready for holy war.” But in 1992, to avoid an arranged marriage, she sought asylum in the Netherlands where she eked out a living cleaning factories, learned Dutch, went to college, entered politics and won a seat in the Dutch Parliament.
And then: She wrote a documentary about the plight of women under Islam. Soon after, the producer, Theo van Gogh, was murdered in the street by a Dutch-Moroccan Muslim who considered it his duty to punish those who criticize his religion. He left a note – pinned with a knife to his victim’s body – threatening Ms. Hirsi Ali’s life as well.
She moved to the United States where, one hopes, she is in less danger. Nevertheless, those who believe freedom of speech does not apply when it comes to Islam are determined to silence her. One example: A year ago this month, officials as Brandeis University, in suburban Boston, withdrew their offer of an honorary degree and an invitation to address their graduating class. They were pressured by an on-line petition — organized by CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, and circulated by some students and faculty — accusing her of “hate speech” and “Islamophobia.” She responded: “What was initially intended as an honor has now devolved into a moment of shaming.”
Nevertheless, she has refused to be intimidated or muzzled. In her new book, “Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now,” she argues that Muslims fall into three categories: a small but significant number who believe they are divinely commanded to wage war against non-Muslims; a large majority who are peaceable but unwilling to stand up to the extremists or repudiate “the theological warrant for intolerance and violence embedded in their own religious texts;” and the dissidents, a small group of individuals who risk everything by denouncing extremists and advocating an interpretation of Islam that unequivocally embraces freedom and peaceful coexistence.
She goes on to propose “five theses” that, she says, Muslims must adopt if there is to be a “Muslim Reformation;” if Islam is to become compatible with modernity, rather than the antidote for modernity; if Muslims are to live in and be productive members of liberal democratic societies, rather than helping to destroy those societies.
Among her theses: that sharia, Islamic law, be regarded as “subordinate to the laws of the nation-states where Muslims live,” and that “the concept of jihad as a literal call to arms against non-Muslims and those Muslims they deem apostates or heretics” be disavowed. A Muslim who rejects those formulations, she argues, must be seen as contributing to the problem, not the solution.
Mr. Hirsi Ali believes “the Muslim Reformation has begun.” I hope she’s right but I don’t see much evidence. Such a movement requires a leader, a Martin Luther, if you will. She cannot be that leader, as she understands, because she is no longer among the believers.
Here in North America, such courageous reformers as Zuhdi Jasser, founder of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, and Irshad Manji, author of “The Trouble with Islam Today,” refuse to be suppressed by threats and fatwas. But the audiences most receptive to their messages are not comprised of Muslims.
Jordan’s King Abdullah II has long promoted a reading of Islam that eschews belligerence. The same is true of Moroccan King Mohammed VI. But beyond the borders of the lands they rule their followers are few.
In January, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi called for reform, telling clerics at Al-Azhar University, the great center of Islamic scholarship: “We have reached the point that Muslims have antagonized the entire world. Is it conceivable that 1.6 billion [Muslims] want to kill the rest of the world’s population of 7 billion, so that Muslims prosper?” But as a tough authoritarian, Gen. Sisi is an unlikely champion of a kinder, gentle Islam.
For now, it is the jihadis who are on the march — literally, in such lands as Syria, Iraq, Nigeria, Libya and Gaza. And then there is the Islamic Republic of Iran which is ruled by followers of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who led the Islamic Revolution of 1979. For him, the idea of Islam as “a religion of peace” was ludicrous. “Those who study jihad,” he proclaimed, “will understand why Islam wants to conquer the whole world.”
If President Obama and Secretary Kerry were to read Ms. Hirsi Ali’s book, they might begin to understand what those committed to revolutionary, supremacist Islam believe, and to what lengths they will go in pursuit of their beliefs. Lacking such understanding, they are bound to be unrealistic about what diplomacy, “outreach” and invitations to join the “international community” can achieve. Lacking such understanding, the American side will continue to be bested in negotiations, seeking common ground while the Iranian side wages war by other means.
The West, Ms. Hirsi Ali writes, is enmeshed in “an ideological conflict” that cannot be won “until the concept of jihad has itself been decommissioned.” By now, perhaps you have perceived this: If American and Western leaders continue to refuse to comprehend who is fighting us and why, the consequences will be dire.
Clifford D. May is president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) and a columnist for the Washington Times. Find him on Twitter @CliffordDMay
All views are attributable only to the author. We encourage discussion of the viewpoints expressed by the author.
Secure Freedom President Frank Gaffney joins Judge Jeanine Pirro to discuss electromagnetic pulse threats to our infrastructure, especially in light of U.S. Aerospace Command’s return to a Cold War-era mountain bunker
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Russia’s lifting its ban on supplying Iran with S-300 air defense missile systems is a direct result of the Obama administration’s nuclear arms deal with the Middle East nation, says Pete Hoekstra, former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.
“This was a deal originally Russia had made back in 2007 with Iran to provide them with sophisticated anti-aircraft equipment,” Hoekstra said Monday on “The Steve Malzberg Show” on Newsmax TV.
“But Russia, because of pressure from the United States and Israel, backed off and really, for almost seven years now, has put that deal on ice.
“Now that they sense a vacuum and a lack of American leadership and they sense that America wants a deal so badly they’re moving into that vacuum and have now announced they’re going to finalize this agreement with Iran and ship this equipment.”
Russia is also dealing with other Middle East nations as a result of the U.S.-Iran deal, said Hoekstra, a former Michigan congressman.
“They’re also moving into a vacuum in Egypt, where the U.S. has been very reluctant to ship military equipment to Egypt, and Russia has negotiated and continues to negotiate more arms deals with Egypt,” he said.
Hoekstra complimented the growing list of Republicans who have declared their candidacies for the 2016 GOP presidential nomination: Sens. Marco Rubio of Florida, Rand Paul of Kentucky and Ted Cruz of Texas.
“The Republicans are actually developing a very exciting feel with Rubio, Paul, Cruz and the other dozen or so other candidates that are going to come in, all of whom have a track record of success,” he said.
“They have an impressive set of credentials individually, and what we have to do and what I hope happens is that they focus on a positive message, an alternative to Hillary Clinton and the Democrats.”
He warned Republican candidates against spending the next year bashing each other.
“They do have differences, but the bottom line is they have a lot more in common than what separates them. That’s what we have to remember and that’s what we need to focus on,” Hoekstra said.
All views are attributable only to the author. We encourage discussion of the viewpoints expressed by the author.
I’m sick and tired of hearing about the Iranians’ brilliance, about what fabulous negotiators they are, about what great game players they are (some say, falsely I believe, that the Persians invented chess, even) and so on and so forth. Frankly, I think Supreme Leader Khamenei, President Rouhani, and the rest of the mob are dolts.
Why? Because they’ve taken a country that’s got everything going for it, and wrecked it. They’ve got abundant resources, an educated population, a real middle class, all manner of commercial skills, and favorable location astride some of the world’s most important land and sea shipping routes. Yet the country is beset with poverty, a crashing birth rate, runaway drug abuse and prostitution, and widespread protests, even in the oil fields where the Ahwazis live.
You may think that all this misery is the result of Western sanctions, but the crashing misery index was evident before any sanction bit the Iranian people, and the wreckage of the country’s water system doesn’t have anything to do with sanctions. The sanctions certainly hurt them, but the mullahs didn’t need the West to ruin the country. They’ve done that all by themselves, and the place would still be a mess if all the sanctions were lifted tomorrow morning.
Is that smart, or doltish?
The latest round of praise for the mullahs’ alleged brilliance regards the nuclear negotiations, where it is said they are getting their way. But it’s an odd definition of diplomatic brilliance, since they’re dealing with an American president who so passionately wants détente with Iran that he doesn’t appear to care about the conditions. Any self-respecting American government official would have walked out when Zarif shrieked at Kerry, but our secretary of state sits and takes the punishment. I’d be more inclined to call this “intimidation.” And it’s more the result of our fecklessness than their elegant brilliance.
Moreover, what are we to make of the various “fact sheets” about the “understanding” with the Iranians, and Khamenei’s apparent gainsaying of at least some of its elements? Khamenei has three basic requirements: an immediate and complete end to sanctions, the continuation of the nuclear program, and acquiescence to his imperial projects, from Iraq, Syria and Lebanon to Yemen, Nigeria and Latin America. Unable to get explicit approval for any of these, he simply reasserts his position. Yes, it buys time, but that’s the result of the American refusal to take “no” for an answer, not the product of brilliant maneuvering.
Khamenei et. al. are very worried about the hostility of their own people, as well they ought to be. The clearest evidence of their fear is the massive repression under way. If they thought they had sufficient popular support, they wouldn’t have to resort to systematic terror.
Their attempt to portray the latest “understanding” is based on a big lie, namely that the sanctions are about to end. But the Iranian people don’t seem to be fooled. They’re telling jokes along the lines of “oh good, now the Iraqis and Syrians will get some good drinks.”
The Khamenei regime is despised by most Iranians, and the regime has certainly earned it. The next time somebody tells you how clever the Iranians are, tell them the ayatollahs have yet to produce a world-class game player. In fact, the last avid Iranian bridge player was probably the shah, and I don’t see anyone in a turban challenging Gary Kasparov to a high-stakes chess match.
All views are attributable only to the author. We encourage discussion of the viewpoints expressed by the author.
The details of the negotiations to nowhere are beside the point.
We Met fans were thrilled by the brilliance of Matt Harvey, who tossed six shutout innings in his first start after missing 19 months due to elbow surgery. It reminded us, though, that “The Dark Knight” is going to demand a huge contract down the road.
It got me to daydreaming about the negotiations. Let’s say that, as the contract deadline approaches, Harvey says he wants $210 million over seven years — the going rate for pitching aces just set by the Washington Nationals’ Max Scherzer. The Mets’ ownership, the parsimonious Wilpon family, counters by offering five years at $15 million per. The two sides are not even close.
The deadline is about to strike midnight. Knowing his fan base will go ballistic and boycott Citi Field if their idol is not inked to a contract, a panicked Fred Wilpon calls a press conference. There, he waves around a blank sheet of paper. Only he insists that it’s not an empty page. It’s a framework! “Don’t worry fans, we have an agreement in principle,” the owner assures us. “We just have to work out a few, er . . . details.”
Then I shake my head and realize: I’m not dreaming the nightmare of the Mets’ Harvey negotiations; I’m living the nightmare of Obama’s Iran negotiations.
There is not, nor has there ever been, an Iran deal. The “framework” the president announced last week was just a stunt. As yet another negotiations deadline loomed with the president plainly unwilling to walk away despite Iranian intransigence, Congress appeared poised to end the farce by voting to stiffen sanctions. The “framework” is a feint designed to dissuade Congress and sustain the farce.
In reality, what we have is simply an Obama administration assumption and a timetable. The assumption is that Iran will become a nuclear-weapons power. The timetable involves dragging out the enervating negotiations-to-nowhere for as long as it takes to inure Americans to the prospect of a nuclear Iran.
I have a confession to make: I don’t follow with rapt attention the “er . . . details.” Oh, I hear day after tedious day of State Department flim-flam. But I can’t take the bargain jargon seriously. You know the old saw about how you just want to know what time it is but the guy instead drones on and on about how to build a clock? That’s Obama’s Iran negotiations.
Well, here’s what time it is: Iran has built its foreign policy around the goal of “Death to America” for the last 36 years. It continues, unabashed, to be the world’s leading state sponsor of jihadist terrorism — in particular, anti-American terrorism. It has killed and abetted the killing of Americans throughout the current regime’s existence. It is a totalitarian sharia state that, at this moment, is imprisoning at least three Americans. One of them, Saeed Abedini, has been sentenced to eight years’ incarceration for establishing Christian houses of worship, which the regime says is a threat to national security. The regime, further, has repeatedly vowed to exterminate Israel, our close ally and the only true democracy in the region.
With such a rogue state, there is only one negotiation a sensible nation — particularly the world’s most powerful nation — can have. You tell them that until they convincingly disavow their anti-American stance, cease their support for terrorism, release American prisoners, and acknowledge Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, that there is no point in discussing anything else.
This is not complicated. It is not, as Obama would have us believe, a call to invade Tehran at midnight and keep 300,000 American troops there for a decade or three. You tell the mullahs that the basic tenets of their existing government make it an enemy regime, so naturally our response must be to use every component of our government — financial, treasury, trade, diplomacy, law-enforcement, intelligence, and military — to punish the Iranian regime until it reforms or disappears. You tell them that, in view of their posture toward our country and our allies, and of their violation of international commitments and resolutions, we regard their nuclear and ballistic-missile programs as unacceptable. Without committing to any specific tactic or set of tactics to undo them, you convey that we are quite serious about taking no options off the table.
Is it true, as the president likes to say, that we should never be afraid to negotiate? Only if we enter negotiations with a firm grasp of our bottom-line requirements. Those must be non-negotiable. We should be afraid of “negotiations” that entail abandoning bottom-line requirements. If that’s what “negotiation” means, it’s just a euphemism for selling out our national interests. They wouldn’t be national interests if they could be compromised without fearful consequences.
In the middle of their negotiations with Obama, the mullahs had one of their top military commanders announce that, as far as Iran is concerned, “erasing Israel off the map” is “nonnegotiable.” That is one of their bottom-line requirements. Obama’s job is to move them off their bottom line, not erase ours.
He isn’t even trying. Thus, the details of Obama’s negotiations with the mullahs are beside the point; the fact that we are negotiating becomes a humiliating defeat — an implicit admission that we accept Iran’s aggression.
Nevertheless, if we bypass this inconvenient reality for the moment and consider Obama’s “framework,” its chicanery is manifest. In the first five minutes of law school, students are presented with a formal principle that, they quickly realize, they have understood since childhood: An agreement is a meeting of the minds. Absent a mutual understanding by both parties of what each has promised to do, you don’t have a “framework” with some “er . . . details” to be worked out. You have bupkis.
And that’s what Obama will surely end up with. Such disdain does the Iranian regime have for the United States, such contempt for our president and his desperation, that Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei won’t even allow Obama the pretense of a deal. With relish, he mocked the president’s phony “framework” this week, declaring the undeniable truth that there is no agreement, that the parties are not even close on the fundamental elements of a pact, and that the “White House fact sheet” is the product of “lying and breaching promises.”
When not smiling across the table at our smitten secretary of state, Iran’s foreign minister can be found laying a wreath at the grave of Hezbollah commander Imad Mugniyah, the man who orchestrated, among countless other atrocities, the 1983 attack that killed 241 U.S. Marines in Beirut. Two weeks ago, while the hapless Secretary Kerry hailed supposed progress in the negotiations, Khamenei reaffirmed his call for “Death to America.” As the negotiations limped along, Iran-backed jihadists known as the Houthis ousted the government of Yemen, triggering the emergency abandonment of the U.S. embassy and potentially enabling Iran to disrupt key commercial sea lanes while establishing a menacing presence on Saudi Arabia’s border. Iranian military officials continue to proclaim that “the American Navy is one of our targets”; just a few weeks ago, as Obama’s negotiations entered what was portrayed as the critical phase, Iran fired ballistic missiles at a mock-up of a U.S. aircraft carrier during naval exercises in the Strait of Hormuz.
Some negotiations. They thunder about attacking us. We twaddle about how many thousands of centrifuges they should keep.
Seriously?
— Andrew C. McCarthy is a policy fellow at the National Review Institute. His latest book is Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama’s Impeachment.
All views are attributable only to the author. We encourage discussion of the viewpoints expressed by the author.