Interim Iran Deal Again and Again

The UN atomic energy watchdog’s Director-General Rafael Grossi will hold a meeting with the officials of Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) in Tehran next Tuesday on November 23. He would hold a news conference in Vienna where his agency is based, upon his return that same day. On the other front, in the IAEA Board of Governors meeting, which will be held next week in Vienna during November 22-26, Grossi will submit his latest report on the IRI’s nuclear program to the Board.

The UN nuclear watchdog on Wednesday November 17 reported that IRI has again boosted its stock of highly enriched uranium, just days before nuclear talks scheduled to resume in Vienna on November 29 between IRI and the world powers. In a separate report on the same day, IAEA detailed an array of unresolved conflicts between the agency and IRI, ranging from Tehran’s continued failure to explain the origin of uranium particles found at undeclared sites, to its refusal to let the IAEA re-install surveillance cameras at the TESA Karaj complex, to the IRI security guards’ excessive invasive physical searches of the IAEA inspectors.

Round II of Flirting with Mullahs is About to Begin

In round one, four years of Trump’s administration dealing with the criminal IRI regime has passed with no clear ending. Now a turning point in the situation is looming in less than two weeks, as the round II of flirting with mullahs begins. 

In what may be posturing by both sides, the leader of Islamic regime mullah Ali Khamenei on Sunday said Tehran’s “final and irreversible” decision was to return to compliance only if Washington lifts sanctions. While the idea was rejected by Washington, Biden emphasized that he would not lift sanctions just to get Iran back to the bargaining table. 

Iran has already begun enriching uranium closer to weapons- grade levels and said it would experiment with uranium metals, a key component of a nuclear warhead. 

Iran’s parliament passed a law in November that if the Americans do not lift financial, banking and oil sanctions by February 21, the government is obliged to expel the IAEA inspections from the country and will definitely end the voluntary implementation of the additional protocol. This would be a serious violation of the JCPOA accord.

“The Biden admin has to recognize the realities of 2021, not 2015. That means no upfront sanctions relief for a regime that’s only expanded its dangerous behavior,” Former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley wrote on Twitter on Sunday.

The sources stressed U.S. President Joe Biden has yet to decide his policy. The United States is weighing a wide array of ideas on how to revive the Iranian nuclear deal, including an option where both sides would take small steps short of full compliance to buy time. This option could entail Washington allowing Tehran to get economic benefits less valuable than the sanctions relief it received under the 2015 deal, just to ease Iran’s economic pain. These steps can include smoothing the way for the IMF loan to Iran, making it easier for humanitarian goods to get through, or embracing a European idea for a credit facility.

Iran Dilemma becomes Problematic, amid Trump’s Re-Election

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US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo at UNSC

Triggering Snapback Mechanism

On August 20, following the rejection of the call on the UNSC from the US State Secretary for the extension of the arms embargo on Iran, Mike Pompeo submitted the US request to the president of the UN Security Council, alerting him of the IRI’s striking noncompliance with the terms of the JCPOA accord. The initiative was identified as the start of the US’s bid to trigger the so-called snapback mechanism.

The US move met with widespread opposition from Europe, followed by Russia and China. France, Germany and Britain said they cannot support Washington’s attempt to restore UN sanctions on Iran, saying the action is incompatible with efforts to support the Iran nuclear deal. Israel, in the meantime, has stated that the US has its full support.

“No country but the United States has had the courage and conviction to put forward a resolution. Instead, they chose to side with the ayatollahs,” US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said. He has also asserted that his country is ready to stop Russia and China from violating sanctions against Iran. 

The United States claims it remains a “participant” in the accord because it was spelled out as such in the UN resolution 2231, upon which the accord has been set out and that any signatory that finds Iran not in compliance has the capacity to request a snapback of the sanctions. 

The JCPOA Trigger Mechanism is Back On

It was around mid January 2020 that the E3 members of JCPOA, Britain, France, and Germany decided, as a response to IRI’s nuclear deal breaches, to kickstart a process that could trigger the deal’s dispute resolution mechanism. However the move did not go forward and Tehran’s nuclear dossier was not handed over to the UN Security Council at the time. Meanwhile, the IRI regime has been slowly but steadily breaking through the limits established by the JCPOA nuclear deal, including the quantity and enrichment level of its uranium stockpile.

On Monday June 15th, at the meeting of the IAEA’s 35-member board of governors, the Director General Mariano Grossi said “Iran has denied the Agency access to two nuclear locations and that, for almost a year, it has not engaged in substantive discussions to clarify our questions related to possible undeclared uncle material and nuclear-related activities.” He added “I call on Iran to cooperate immediately and fully with the Agency, including by providing prompt access to the locations specified by us.”

Yesterday North Korea, Tomorrow Iran

Apocalyptic Mullahs’ Regime in Iran

History is doomed to repeat itself due to the lack of effective and capable world leaders, what we have instead are bunch of political dwarfs who are nothing more than elected mercenaries of the one-percent-rich sector, whose only purpose are to preserve their empires of wealth with the cost of pain and suffering burdened on shoulders of the world grassroots. 

About two decades ago Bill Clinton’s imprudence paved the way for N Korea to become an atomic power; today the Obama’s naivety and incompetence is setting the stepping stones for the Iranian mullahs to get access to nuclear weapon.

The reality behind these phony agreements is the fact that they are intentionally outlined, by the puppeteers, in a way to keep these bogeymen puppets and their threats alive and going so that the allied States are intimidated by them and make them permanent arm-buying customers for defense purposes. [DID]

North Korea claims that on Tuesday night, it tested a hydrogen bomb. If true, it was a typically aggressive act by an evil regime. The White House said, however, that Pyongyang was doing something quite different, but also typical — engaging in empty boasting to exaggerate the Hermit Kingdom’s martial strength.

Whatever happened on Tuesday night, the reanimated North Korean nuclear threat holds a lesson about what happens when Washington makes agreements with regimes that are, to their core, untrustworthy. It often extends the lives of those regimes and facilitates the crisis it is intended to avert. That, of course, is why the rogue regime is interested in achieving a deal.

In 1985, North Korea signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty so it could openly share in the world’s advances in peaceful nuclear technology. Among the obligations it incurred in doing so was a requirement to disclose its nuclear progress (for example, the amount of weapons-grade plutonium it had produced) and submit to international inspections.

Boosted by Nuke Deal, Iranian Mullahs Up Funding to Proxies

Releasing billions of dollars to the Iranian Mullahs will not only increase their funding of terrorist activities in the Middle East and beyond, but more importantly the resulting political instability will exacerbate the human migration tragedy that is taking place today. Obama is looking like a tragically weak game theorist. He thinks that he can achieve successful outcomes in international affairs by using all carrots and no sticks. It won’t work against enemies who are prepared to use both. Unless he rethinks his self-imposed limits on the use of force, the bill for his mismanagement will come due, and everyone will pay the price—during his term and beyond. [DID]

Sunday, the director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Yukiya Amano, arrived in Iran for talks on the nuclear agreement, as part of what appears to be an attempt by the UN nuclear watchdog to evaluate whether Iran ran a military nuclear program in the past.

Amano is expected to meet with various Iranian nuclear scientists for answers on this very subject. On December 15, ahead of the lifting of crippling economic sanctions on Tehran, he is slated to present the world with definitive answers that will determine whether Iran complied with the terms of a nuclear deal signed on July 15. But the Islamic Republic is not waiting for a green light from Amano or the international community, and is working under the assumption that the sanctions will be lifted.

Since the deal was signed, Iran has significantly increased its financial support for two of the largest terror groups in the region that have become political players, Hamas and Hezbollah. In the years before the deal was signed, the crippling sanctions limited this support, which had significantly diminished along with Iran’s economy. But Tehran’s belief that tens, or hundreds, of billions of dollars will flow into the country in the coming years as a result of sanctions relief has led to a decision to boost the cash flow to these terror organizations.

Why GOP Congressional Leaders Rigged a Law to Authorize Obama to Lift the Iran Sanctions

The problem is with the lobbyists’ financial support of the federal government and its influence on the federal systems’ adopted policies. Elections in United States including Presidential, Congressional, and Supreme Court, are all counted on the financial supports by different groups of business controlling market. Moreover, the post-election monetary contributions are continued in almost all branches of the federal system from executive, to legislative, and judicial, which play a detrimental role in their enacted policies. This article, for instance, states that Boeing Company has been a major GOP and Democrat donor; it has provided annual financial allocations to various congressional leaderships and committees. The GOP congressional recipients of these funds in turn consider favoritism in their course of action to make sure the funds will not stopped coming in for the next year, and hence they pave the way for Obama to be authorized to lift the sanctions against Iran. And of course Boeing stands to reap huge money from Obama’s lifting of the sanctions by selling aircrafts to Mullahs.

As long as the lobbyists’ monetary influences in the federal elections and systems’ functions are not stopped, the US government won’t be able to adopt policies in favor of real interests of the people of America and the world. [DID]

Why on earth would Republicans do that?” That is a question I’ve been asked at least a dozen times since illustrating that the GOP has played a cynical game in connection with President Obama’s Iran deal. “Follow the money” is a common answer to questions about political motivation. It may not explain everything in this case, but it is certainly relevant.

This spring, Republican leadership colluded with the White House and congressional Democrats to enact a law — the Corker-Cardin Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act — that guaranteed Obama would be authorized to lift sanctions against Iran (the main objective of the terrorist regime in Tehran). The rigged law authorized Obama to lift sanctions as long as Republicans could not pass a resolution of disapproval. As Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, House Speaker John Boehner, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker, and other GOP leaders well knew, there was no way they would ever be able to enact a disapproval resolution over Obama’s veto. But the process choreographed by Corker-Cardin meant they would be able to complain about the deal and vote to disapprove it — thereby creating the impression that they were staunchly against the lifting of sanctions that they had already authorized.

Senator Tom Cotton: Iran Nuclear Deal a Product of Obama’s ‘Hubris’

Obama’s legacy of disaster will prevail when his Iran deal starts reaping malicious crop and the theocratic regime surprises the world with its nuclear proliferation gift among the Islamic proxies. The terrorist Mullahs will teach US a resentful lesson to remember for decades to come that it should never trust rogue states, in particular those whose despotic rulers wish its people harm. The bitter tragedy is that the resulting burden of the Obama’s foreign policy of eight years passivity and appeasement in dealing with repressive regimes will be extended over the shoulder of the next US president. It is hoped that the next coming president is the one who believes in the democracy advocacy of America and has the capacity and tenacious dedication to stand up against adversaries and oppressive regimes. [DID]

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) said on Tuesday night that President Obama’s nuclear agreement with Iran prioritizes his quest for a personal legacy above the nation’s needs. “Obama’s disregard for the treaty process is the height of hubris,” Cotton said, according to The Washington Free Beacon.

“He mistook his desire for a legacy for a vital national interest,” he added. “It [is] bad precedent to allow a nuclear arms control agreement with a sworn enemy to go into effect without even a bare majority of support.” Cotton’s remarks follow the Senate’s second vote against a resolution disapproving of Obama’s historic pact with Iran.

The Shady Family Behind America’s Iran Lobby

The paid lobbyists of IRI reformers have been busy lobbying political officials and lawmakers in foreign states to clean up the mullahs’ messes by presenting to them showcases of fabricated data on IRI’s records in favor of the regime for undermining its committed crimes, sponsorship of terrorism, nuclear threats, and also to promote the cause for the reform of the Islamic regime. These IRI lobbyists have ties to U.S. lawmakers and have infiltrated the White House, Congress, the State Department, and the main decision making centers of the US government. They have managed to influence and shape the U.S. government policy towards Islamic regime in Iran in favor of the IRI reformers, who are part of the regime. The question is why are the bureaucracies in Washington partnering with IRI lobbyists and the IRI reformers and not with the democracy promoting political forces of Iran? The answer may be embedded in the fact that Barack Hussein in the White House is a Muslim and an effective Islam promoter in the world! After all he bowed to Saudi king, supported Mohamed Morsi of Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, and lastly he has stretched his hand to terrorist mullahs in Iran. [DID]

When the world’s major powers struck a deal over Iran’s nuclear program in Vienna in July, it represented a victory not just for the Islamic Republic, which has now been granted international legitimacy as a nuclear threshold state, but also for a small but increasingly influential lobby in America, one which has long sought rapprochement between Washington and Tehran and now seeks to leverage a successfully concluded nuclear deal as a means to that end.

This Iran lobby, publicly represented by the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), has become a staunch institutional ally of the White House selling the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, as the nuclear deal is known. But while NIAC has done the heavy-lifting—the ad-buying, the leafleting, and congressional meet-and-greets, all designed to sell lawmakers on the Iran deal—its political efforts also underwrite the economic interests of one very well connected but low-profile Iranian family, the Namazis, who played a key role as intellectual architects of NIAC.  

Cleaning Up After the Obama Team’s Iran Deal

Iran deal is a virtual contract under which US is hiring mullahs to plow the whole Middle East, a geopolitical task to redraw the regional map that Uncle Sam couldn’t pursue on its own for three reasons: first, lack of public support for war; second, economic downturn, and finally deficit of effective leadership in the White House. [DID]

‘We couldn’t have negotiated a better deal.” That is one of the two pillars of the Obama administration’s argument in favor of its nuclear arrangement with Iran, the other being, “there’s no alternative but war.” Those two propositions appear to have won the day—at least with enough Democrats in Congress to prevent a vote disapproving of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. The Iran deal remains deeply unpopular with the American public and with the Republican majority in Congress.

Over the past few months, the two propositions regarding the deal left opponents sputtering a catalog of its numerous defects. But it must be admitted that the first proposition—“we couldn’t have negotiated a better deal”—is contextually true.

Consider who the “we” are. President Obama, the deal’s principal proponent, has repeatedly refused to recognize the existence of Islamist radicalism and failed to enforce even his own red line against Bashar Assad’s use of poison gas in Syria.

Senator Your Hands are Soaked with the Americans’ Blood

The following memo was submitted to all the democratic members of US Senate on an individual contact basis.

Dear Congressman, Do you know that your hands are soaked with the Americans’ blood if you endorse the Iran nuclear deal. You probably ask “How is that?”, Here is why: The IRI regime has been killing Americans since it came to power in 1979, just look at the following list,

1. In 1983 the suicide bombing of U.S. military barracks in Beirut executed by the Islamic Jihad Organization, an Iranian regime’s terror proxy, left 299 Americans dead.
2. The Khobar Towers bombing in 1996 carried out by IRI-supported groups of Hezbollah resulted in death of 19 U.S. service men.
3.  60% of all American combat casualties in Iraq have been caused by IRI-made IEDs.
4. 50% of combat casualties in Afghanistan have been caused by IRI-made IEDs.
5. The footprint of IRI’s terrorism in America has become more apparent when the U.S. District Court Rules Iran Behind 9/11 Attacks

Christians Persecuted at Alarming Rate in Iran, Arab world, US Report Says

Four Iranian Christians were reportedly sentenced to 80 lashes for drinking wine for communion, a shocking punishment.

Christians are under siege in the Middle East, and the Obama administration is not doing enough to stop religious persecution by its allies, according to a new report from a bipartisan federal commission.

The report, from the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, faulted usual suspects Iran, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, as well as North Korea. The number of Christians in the Middle East has plunged to just 10 percent of the overall population from more than 25 percent in 2011.

Obama’s Receding Foreign-Policy Dreams

President Barack Obama envisioned building a foreign-policy legacy in his second term: a nuclear deal with sanction-strapped Iran, an end to U.S. involvement in conflicts overseas, and a successful pivot to Asia, including a trans-Pacific trade pact.

Fifteen months after his second inaugural, those goals look more problematic, and Syria’s Bashar al-Assad and Russia’s Vladimir Putin have created new crises. Dashed foreign-policy dreams aren’t unique to this second-term president:

The Mullahs’ larger Nuclear Strategy

As a reader of Khomeinist global strategies since the early 1980s, and as I have argued over decades in books and articles, Tehran’s regime possesses a much larger nuclear strategy than the simple acquisition of mass destruction weapons. Over the last few years, the United States and its Western allies have been led to focus on the visible part of the Iranian buildup, missing the much greater construct undertaken over several generations of rulers of the same Iranian regime. Since the so-called “Iran nuclear deal” was inked last fall, Washington acts as if it has somewhat halted (or at least slowed) the strategic program of Tehran and thus has been rewarding the Ayatollahs, but the reality flies in the face of this assumption and agreement.

Mullahs Diplomacy needs Teeth

Barack Obama, president of the United States, does not like to back his diplomacy with military force. He believes there should be a clear sequence of engagement: diplomacy, sanctions, more diplomacy, perhaps more sanctions, and only after all peaceful alternatives are exhausted, the possibility of force. Even then, the administration is loath to entertain such hypotheticals.

This explains why economic sanctions are now the default instrument of American coercive statecraft for confronting challenges to the international order. When Russia invaded Crimea in February, Mr. Obama turned to his “favourite non-combatant command” at the U.S. Treasury Department to design targeted sanctions to increase the costs of Russian revanchism.