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The Iran Threat

The Council on Foreign Relation’s Criticism of Obama is Devastating

Like poker with a card sharp.

BY CounterJihad · @CounterjihadUS | July 14, 2016

Elliot Abrams is a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.  He is a highly-educated former diplomat who served in both the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations.  He has recently penned a criticism of the Obama administration’s ongoing refusal to acknowledge Iran’s cheating on the so-called “Iran Deal.”  His criticism begins with the same German intelligence report we noted here last week.

“Iran isn’t only being more aggressive since the signing of the JCPOA—in Iraq and Syria, for example, or in cyberattacks on the United States,” Abrams notes.  Iran “is also cheating on the deal.”

So what has the United States government done to restrain the cheating?

“Nothing.”

That is not to say that they haven’t made some remarks about it when directly asked.

When asked in April if Iran would “stick to the key terms of this deal for the next 20 years,” Kerry said, “I have faith and confidence that we will know exactly what they’re doing during that period of time. And if they decide to try to cheat, we will know it, and there are plenty of options available to us. That I have complete faith and confidence in.”

That’s nice. But now we know they are cheating, and the option the administration appears to have chosen is silence. Just ignore the problem.

When asked about the German intel report and the Institute for Science and International Security report, the State Department spokesman replied, “We have absolutely no indication that Iran has procured any materials in violation of the JCPOA.”

Needless to say, this kind of response will only encourage Iranian officials to cheat more, secure in the knowledge that Obama administration officials will not call them out on it, nor choose any serious one of the “plenty of options” Kerry said they have.

This means that Iran’s breakout time will diminish, and the danger to its neighbors and to the United States will grow and grow.

That is a devastating but well-deserved criticism of the administration’s willful blindness to the dangers of Iran.  There may be another reason that violations of the so-called deal is being treated with kid gloves by the administration, however.  To admit that Iran is cheating might reopen the question of the wisdom of the deal in the first place.  That would involve revisiting the fact that the administration only ever sold the deal at all through a calculated campaign of lies.  Don’t take our word for it.  Take the word of one of Obama’s top advisers, Ben Rhodes — whose chief qualification was that he was a creative writing major.

How did it all work?  “Legions of arms-control experts began popping up” — all fake, of course — to support the President’s position.  Some of these groups were funded by Iranian money.  Rhodes names them himself:  “We had test drives to know who was going to be able to carry our message effectively, and how to use outside groups like Ploughshares, the Iran Project and whomever else.”

Government outlets like NPR took Iran lobby money, and then silenced critics of the deal.  The fix, as so often with this administration, was in.

Nor did the campaign to deceive the American public end with the President’s public signing ceremony for the Iran deal — a ceremony not duplicated in Iran, by the way, meaning that the only person to sign the “Iran deal” is Barack Obama himself.  After the deal passed, the same Ben Rhodes echo chamber was used to push a completely false narrative that moderates and reformers had won Iran’s elections in the wake of the “deal.”  The message was meant to be that the deal had transformed Iran into a more open democracy, just as our wise President had intended.

In fact, 99% of reformers and moderates were disqualified by the Guardian Council before the elections were even held.  Once moderate or reformist parties had to fill their ranks with hardliners even to qualify for the polls.  The same man who disqualified the reformers and moderates, Guardian Council leader Ahmad Jannati, will now appoint the next Supreme Leader of Iran.  Jannati is among the hardest of the hardliners.  The effect on Iran’s political culture, if any, was to solidify the control of the hardline faction.

We can’t admit Iran is cheating on the deal it didn’t sign, because then we’d risk asking how wise it was to sign the deal ourselves.  To re-examine that question would mean facing up to the campaign of intentional deception waged by an American President against the American people.  Such a reckoning is much deserved, but it will not be forthcoming as long as he has his hands on the levers of power.

Backgrounders

BREAKING NEWS & RESEARCH

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