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North Korean Nukes, South Korea, Japan, China and Obama

September 10, 2016

North Korean Nukes, South Korea, Japan, China and Obama, Dan Miller’s Blog, September 10, 2016

(The views expressed in this article are mine and do not necessarily reflect those of Warsclerotic or its other editors. — DM)

On September 9th, North Korea conducted its fifth nuke test, of its most powerful nuke thus far. Can Obama get China to help make North Korea stop developing and testing nukes? Nope. China sees Obama, not as the representative of the world’s greatest power, but as a joke. He has no clout internationally and is a national embarrassment.

China and North Korea – a very short history

Here’s a link to an article I posted on June 25, 2013 about the Korean conflict. To summarize, China and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) have a long history of acting together. China views the Republic of Korea (South Korea), which borders North Korea to the south and is an American ally, as a threat. She does not want reunification of the Korean peninsula under a government favorable to America.

When, on June 25, 1950, North Korea invaded South Korea with Russian aircraft, weaponry, training and other substantial support, China did not assist North Korea. North Korean forces pushed the South Korean government, as well as the few American military advisers (then under the command of the Department of State), south to the Pusan perimeter. Following General MacArthur’s unexpected and successful Inchon invasion which began on September 15th, American and other United Nations forces pushed the North Korean forces back north: MacArthur sent his by then greatly augmented forces east to Wonson and eventually managed to push North Korean forces to the northern side of the Yalu River. However, Chinese forces struck back en masse and MacArthur’s forces were driven back to Seoul.

Ever since bringing to an end MacArthur’s successes in the Korean Conflict, China has supported North Korea. She has opposed, and has then declined to enforce, significant sanctions responsive to North Korean nuclear and missile development and testing. While China may acquiesce in weak UN resolutions condemning North Korean provocations, she rarely goes beyond that.

China, Japan and the two Koreas

China has a long memory and still resents, bitterly, the lengthy period prior to and during World War II when Japan occupied significant parts of China. Ditto South Korea, all of which was under Japanese occupation for a lengthy period prior to and during World War II. Although China has substantial trade with both South Korea and Japan, she is more hostile to Japan than is South Korea; the latter two have substantial mutual interests transcending trade.

Perhaps the most important current dispute between China on the one hand, and Japan-South Korea-America on the other, involves the plans of Japan and South Korea to defend against North Korean missiles by the installation of THAAD anti-missile weapons provided by America. China’s stated reason for opposition to the THAAD system is that it could be used against Chinese, as well as North Korean, missiles. Why does China assert this objection unless she hopes to fire missiles at one or both of them? If China fires missiles at Japan and/or South Korea, they have every right to destroy her missiles and to respond in kind with U.S. assistance if requested.

President Obama

condemned Pyongyang’s fifth nuclear test today in the “strongest possible terms as a grave threat to regional security and to international peace and stability” as outraged lawmakers from both parties called for tougher action to stop North Korea’s nuclear program. [Emphasis added.]

That may well be all that Obama does — despite the warnings of Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, that

we have to make it absolutely clear that if they engage in any military activity, they will be destroyed. We have to have a credible deterrent. That seems to be the only thing that will stop North Korea from engaging in military action… We have sanctioned them, and we should keep sanctioning them, but it’s not going to stop them from developing the nuclear weapons.” [Emphasis added.]

Obama won’t do that:

In a statement Friday, President Obama vowed to “take additional significant steps, including new sanctions, to demonstrate to North Korea that there are consequences to its unlawful and dangerous actions.”

Obama did not suggest what He might have in mind, beyond historically ineffective sanctions and condemnations “in the strongest possible terms,” to let North Korea know that there will be “consequences.”

A September 9th article at the New York Times provides an unpleasant analysis of the options Obama now has, and which His successor will have, in dealing with North Korea.

A hard embargo, in which Washington and its allies block all shipping into and out of North Korea and seek to paralyze its finances, risks confrontations that allies in Asia fear could quickly escalate into war. But restarting talks on the North’s terms would reward the defiance of its young leader, Kim Jong-un, with no guarantee that he will dismantle the nuclear program irrevocably.

For more than seven years, President Obama has sought to find a middle ground, adopting a policy of gradually escalating sanctions that the White House once called “strategic patience.” But the test on Friday — the North’s fifth and most powerful blast yet, perhaps with nearly twice the strength of its last one — eliminates any doubt that that approach has failed and that the North has mastered the basics of detonating a nuclear weapon.

Despite sanctions and technological backwardness, North Korea appears to have enjoyed a burst of progress in its missile program over the last decade, with experts warning that it is speeding toward a day when it will be able to threaten the West Coast of the United States and perhaps the entire country. [Emphasis added.]

. . . .

Mr. Obama has refused to negotiate with the North unless it agrees first that the ultimate objective of any talks would be a Korean Peninsula without nuclear arms. But Mr. Kim has demonstrated, at least for now, that time is on his side. And as he gets closer to an ability to threaten the United States with a nuclear attack, and stakes the credibility of his government on it, it may be even more difficult to persuade him to give up the program.

In a statement Friday, Mr. Obama condemned the North’s test and said it “follows an unprecedented campaign of ballistic missile launches, which North Korea claims are intended to serve as delivery vehicles intended to target the United States and our allies.”

“To be clear, the United States does not, and never will, accept North Korea as a nuclear state,” he said.

Many experts who have dealt with North Korea say the United States may have no choice but to do so. [Emphasis added.]

“It’s too late on the nuclear weapons program — that is not going to be reversed,” William Perry, the defense secretary under President Bill Clinton during the 1994 nuclear crisis with North Korea, said in August at a presentation in Kent, Conn. The only choice now, he argued, is to focus on limiting the missile program. [Emphasis added.]

Obama has taken no significant steps to limit Iran’s continuing missile development and testing program. How can He limit that of North Korea without Chinese cooperation?

Yet the latest effort to do that, an agreement between the United States and South Korea to deploy an advanced missile defense system in the South, has inflamed China, which argues the system is also aimed at its weapons. While American officials deny that, the issue has divided Washington and Beijing so sharply that it will be even more difficult now for them to come up with a joint strategy for dealing with the North. [Emphasis added.]

China has been so vocal with its displeasure over the deployment of the American system that Mr. Kim may have concluded he could afford to upset Beijing by conducting Friday’s test. [Emphasis added.]

Fueling that perception were reports that a North Korean envoy visited Beijing earlier this week.

“North Korea almost certainly sees this as an opportunity to take steps to enhance its nuclear and missile capabilities with little risk that China will do anything in response,” Evans J.R. Revere, a former State Department official and North Korea specialist, said in a speech in Seoul on Friday. [Emphasis added.]

The breach between China and the United States was evident during Mr. Obama’s meeting with President Xi Jinping last week. “I indicated to him that if the Thaad bothered him, particularly since it has no purpose other than defensive and does not change the strategic balance between the United States and China, that they need to work with us more effectively to change Pyongyang’s behavior,” Mr. Obama said, referring to the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system, as the advanced missile defense project is known. [Emphasis added.]

North Korea and Iran

Iran and North Korea have a long history of cooperation in developing nukes and missiles with which to deliver them. In the past, Iranian scientists have been present at North Korean nuke tests, and vice versa. They have also assisted each other in the development of nukes and missiles.

Iran and North Korea have substantial reasons to cooperate: by virtue of the Iran scam, Iran now has lots of money but is at least minimally restricted in its nuke development. North Korea has little usable currency, needs whatever it can get, and no attempts to halt or even to limit its nuke development have worked.

A missile fired recently by North Korea bore a striking resemblance to an Iranian missile.

Photos released by North Korea of its launch of long-range ballistic missiles are the latest proof of the close military cooperation between Pyongyang and Tehran, an Israeli expert in the field told the news site IsraelDefense on Tuesday.

According to Tal Inbar — head of Space and UAV Research Centre at the Fisher Institute for Air & Space Strategic Studies — what was new in the photos was the shape of the warheads attached to the Nodong missiles, known in Iran as the Shahab-3.

Until now, such warheads — first detected by Inbar in Iran in 2010 — have not been seen in North Korea. At the time, Inbar dubbed them NRVs (or, “new entry vehicles”), which became their nickname among missile experts around the world. [Emphasis added.]

Inbar told IsraelDefense: “The configuration that we saw [on Tuesday] is identical to what we saw in Iran six years ago. In principle, its penetrating body (warhead) is identical to that of Scud missiles, but is mounted on the Shahab-3, and creates a more stable entity than other Shahab/Nodong warheads.”

Inbar said this was the third time that something of this nature had appeared in Iran before it did in North Korea. “But we must remember that the two countries engage in close cooperation where military and space-directed missiles are concerned,” he said. “It is thus possible that both plans and technology are being transferred regularly from one to the other.” [Emphasis added.]

Are North Korea and Iran rational? According to this New York Times analysis, North Korea is.

North Korea’s actions abroad and at home, while abhorrent, appear well within its rational self-interest, according to a 2003 study by David C. Kang, a political scientist now at the University of Southern California. At home and abroad, he found, North Korean leaders shrewdly determined their interests and acted on them. (In an email, he said his conclusions still applied.) [Emphasis added.]

“All the evidence points to their ability to make sophisticated decisions and to manage palace, domestic and international politics with extreme precision,” Mr. Kang wrote. “It is not possible to argue these were irrational leaders, unable to make means-ends calculations.” [Emphasis added.]

Victor Cha, a Georgetown University professor who served as the Asian affairs director on George W. Bush’s National Security Council, has repeatedly argued that North Korea’s leadership is rational.

I submit that the same analysis, applied to Iran, produces the same result. Iran’s leaders know what they want, and are sufficiently rational to achieve it; they did. Obama, not the leader of a dictatorial theocracy, is sufficiently irrational to believe that what he wants for the Islamic Republic of Iran is what America needs it to have. It is not.

Obama and Iran

Obama’s Iran scam would be farcical were it not potentially deadly. He did not do what would have been best for America and the free world in general — increase sanctions until Iran complied fully with UN resolutions on missile testing, ceased Uranium enrichment and disposed of the means to do it, ceased all nuke research as well as all nuke cooperation with North Korea and ceased supporting all terrorist groups, including Hezbollah and Hamas. Instead, perhaps considering Himself above such trivia, Obama sought little more than what He considered His greatest achievement — His legacy:

Conclusions

If Obama were viewed internationally as the powerful leader of the world’s most powerful nation, He might be able to get China to clamp down, severely and successfully, on North Korea’s nuke and missile development. Were China to reject His overtures, He could arrange for it to wish that it had acceded. That’s not who Obama is, as demonstrated by, among His other actions, entering into the Iran Scam deal with Iran.

Perhaps Kim Jong-un needs to dress like an Iranian mullah to convince Obama to give him a “deal” similar to the one He gave to Iran. He had better hurry: that won’t work with President Trump.

Categories: Axis of evil, China, Contempt for America, Foreign policy, Iran - sanctions relief, Iran and North Korea, Iran scam, Iranian missile warheads, Iranian missiles, Iranian nukes, Iranian proxies, Japan, North Korea, North Korea sanctions, North Korean missiles, North Korean nukes, Obama and China, Obama and Iran, Obama and North Korea, South Korea
Tags: Axis of evil, China, Contempt for America, Foreign Policy, Iran - sanctions relief, Iran and North Korea, Iran Scam, Iranian missile warheads, Iranian missiles, Iranian nukes, Iranian proxies, Japan, North Korea, North Korea sanctions, North Korean missiles, North Korean nukes, Obama and China, Obama and Iran, Obama and North Korea, South Korea

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Cartoons of the Day

September 10, 2016

iranian-navy-copy

hillarys-excuses-copy

hillary-allergic-copy-1

Categories: Hillary Clinton, Humor, Kerry, Obama and Iran
Tags: Humor, Kerry, Obama and Iran

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Obama Admin: Iran Was Only Paid $1.7 Billion in Cash After Hostages Released

September 8, 2016

Obama Admin: Iran Was Only Paid $1.7 Billion in Cash After Hostages Released, Washington Free Beacon, Adam Kredo, September 8, 2016

Assan Rouhani, The President of Iran during the United Nations General Assembly at the United Nations General Assembly Hall on September 25, 2015 in New York City. Photo by Dennis Van Tine/Sipa USA

Hassan Rouhani. Photo by Dennis Van Tine/Sipa USA

Senior Obama administration officials, under the threat of a subpoena, were forced to appear on Capitol Hill on Thursday to explain why lawmakers and the American public were kept in the dark about a $1.7 billion cash payment to Iran that has been widely viewed as a ransom to free imprisoned U.S. hostages.

Four senior administration officials declined to provide in-depth explanations of how U.S. funds were transferred to Iran, but said that at least $1.3 billion was withdrawn from a U.S. taxpayer fund and sent to Iran only after it released the hostages.

The payments to Iran were made in hard currency after the United States delivered the funds to European banks. The money was converted into hard currency and bank notes before being transferred to an official from the Central Bank of Iran for transport to Tehran, according to the officials.

Administration officials confirmed that the $1.7 billion payment only went through once the United States was able to secure the release of several U.S. hostages being held in Iran—though the officials would not say this amounted to a ransom.

The Obama administration also could not guarantee lawmakers that the money would not be spent by Iran to fund terror operations.

These disclosures appear to confirm key details about the payment that the administration had either denied or declined to elaborate on for months.

Details are only becoming public now following several news reports and leaks from Congress about the source of the payment, which has been shrouded in mystery since January, when it was first announced.

“This committee requested records … more than a month ago and to date the self-proclaimed most transparent administration in our history has failed to provide any, not one document to this committee,” said Rep. Sean Duffy (R., Wis.), a member of the House Financial Services Committee, during the hearing.

“The witnesses today only agreed under threat of subpoena” to appear before Congress, Duffy said.

The testimony by these administration officials is likely to fuel claims that the payment amounted to a ransom, following the admission that the administration only went through with the cash delivery after it was able to confirm that the U.S. hostages had left Iran.

“You can’t tell me that you guaranteed our prisoners would have been released had your money not been sent,” Duffy said to Christopher Backemeyer, a deputy assistant secretary for Iranian affairs at the State Department.

Backemeyer also could not provide a guarantee that the money would not be spent by Iran on terrorist operations.

“I can’t speak to every dollar that’s going to go in or out of Iran,” he said.

“There is a risk you have taken in providing $1.7 billion to the leading state sponsor of terrorism in the world,” Duffy said.

European officials handed off the first payment of $400 million in cash to Iran on Jan. 17, only after Iran agreed to release the U.S. hostages following an evening of negotiations that included Secretary of State John Kerry, officials said.

After converting the U.S. funds to European bank notes and cash, the money was given to an “official from the Central Bank of Iran for transfer to Tehran,” according to Paul Ahern, assistant general counsel for enforcement and intelligence at the Treasury Department. “The funds were under U.S. government control until their disbursement.”

The remaining $1.3 billion was withdrawn from a U.S. taxpayer fund operated by the Treasury Department and sent to Europe. Once there, the money was converted into foreign currency and transferred to a representative of Iran’s central bank on Jan. 22 and Feb. 5.

Information about the payment and the circumstances surrounding it remains a mystery.

The administration officials made the decision to pay Iran in cash, even though other options existed.

“Iran had to have it in cash,” Ahren said. “Iran was very aware of the difficulties it would face in accessing and using the funds if they were in any other form than cash, even after the lifting of sanctions.”

A cash delivery “was the most reliable way that they received the funds in a timely manner and it was the manner preferred by the relative foreign banks,” Ahren said.

“For them,” Backemeyer added, “the critical need was they [Iran] got immediate access.”

The administration officials would not provide in-depth details, citing diplomatic sensitivities.

“My guess is, if any private citizen had done what this administration did, they’d be indicted on money laundering and the administration calls in diplomacy,” said Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R., Texas), who questioned why the deal was hidden from the public

“Why did the administration go to such great lengths to hide it from the American people?” Hensarling asked. “Why did I have to threaten subpoenas to get the administration to show up in the first place?”

The State Department’s Backemeyer explained that some details could only be divulged in a classified setting.

“There will be limitations to what I and my colleagues can say in an open setting,” he explained. “There are a number of litigations and diplomatic sensitivities that could jeopardize U.S. interests if we were to go into too much detail.”

When asked why the United states agreed to pay $1.3 billion in interest to Iran from a taxpayer fund, a State Department official bristled.

“The details of why we settled for this amount are litigation sensitive,” said Lisa Grosh, a legal adviser in the State Department’s office of international claims and investment disputes. “Iran’s lawyers would try to use my words or maybe even your words against us to help their position at the [claims] tribunal. I believe this settlement was the best thing for the United States.”

Categories: Iran - hostages, Iran - ransom payments, Iran and terror, Iran scam, Obama administration, Obama and Iran, Obama and Iran scam, Obama and ransom payments, U.S. Congress
Tags: Iran - hostages, Iran - ransom payments, Iran and terror, Iran Scam, Obama Administration, Obama and Iran, Obama and Iran scam, Obama and ransom payments, U.S. Congress

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Cartoons of the Day

September 6, 2016

H/t Freedom is Just Another Word

nuke-codes

resethil

marshmellow

Categories: Hillary Clinton, Humor, Obama and Iran
Tags: Humor, Obama and Iran

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Iran and the future of the Middle East

September 2, 2016

Iran and the future of the Middle East, Israel Hayom, Clifford D. May, September 2, 2016

U.S. President Richard Nixon went to China. President Barack Obama will not be going to Iran.

Nixon’s 1972 visit to the people’s republic included meetings with both Chairman Mao Zedong, the communist revolutionary leader, and Premier Zhou Enlai, the pragmatic head of the government. Detente and normalization of relations followed.

By stark contrast, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Islamic republic’s revolutionary supreme leader, and Hassan Rouhani, the pragmatic president of the theocratic regime, will not deign even to share a bottle of pomegranate juice with Obama, president of “satanic” America, their avowed enemy.

Obama appears unperturbed, confident that detente and normalization of relations — not to mention a more stable Middle East — lie at the end of the road he began to pave with his 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, a nuclear deal that garnered neither Congress’ endorsement nor the public’s approval.

The fraught controversy over how we got to this point and where we’re heading is the subject of a new book: “The Iran Wars: Spy Games, Bank Battles, and the Secret Deals that Reshaped the Middle East,” by Jay Solomon, chief foreign affairs correspondent for The Wall Street Journal.

What I found striking in this first draft of contemporary history: the opportunities Obama missed — or, more precisely, dismissed. In 2009, the brutish Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was declared the winner of presidential elections that were not just manipulated by Khamenei — that’s standard procedure — but almost certainly falsified as well. Iranians went out into the streets chanting “Death to the dictators!” and “President Obama, are you with us or against us?”

According to Solomon, not only did Obama refuse to support them, he ended programs to document Iranian human rights abuses and ordered the CIA to turn its back on the Green Movement. “The agency has contingency plans for supporting democratic uprisings anywhere in the world,” Solomon writes. “This includes providing dissidents with communications, money, and in extreme cases even arms. But in this case the White House ordered it to stand down.”

Obama also was unenthusiastic about sanctions. He and Secretary of State John Kerry believed that showing Iran’s rulers respect and engaging them in dialogue would be sufficient to mitigate their animosity and bellicosity. “So many wars have been fought over misunderstandings, misinterpretations, lack of effective diplomacy,” Kerry told Solomon in a 2016 interview. “War is the failure of diplomacy.”

I suspect Clausewitz and Sun Tzu would beg to differ. More to the point, quite a few members of Congress, including such Republicans as Mark Kirk, Ed Royce and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, and such Democrats as Bob Menendez, Eliot Engel and Howard Berman, were convinced that talking softly was not enough, that when dealing with Iran’s rulers it was necessary to carry a sizeable stick. Solomon notes that congressional staffers partnered with several Washington think tanks to find “new ways to squeeze Iran’s oil profits and ability to conduct financial transactions.”

In particular, he adds, a “lethal weapon” came from the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (the think tank I founded after 9/11/01 and where I serve as president) which “focuses on combating Middle East extremism and, in particular, promoting the security of the United States, Israel and other democracies threatened by radical Islam.” FDD’s executive director, Mark Dubowitz, and his Farsi-speaking research team “provided a constant stream of reports to U.S. lawmakers on Iranian companies and individuals that they believed should be sanctioned for their roles in developing Iran’s nuclear program.”

Eventually, Dubowitz, working with Senator Kirk’s then deputy chief of staff Richard Goldberg, came up with a “financial bomb”: a Belgium-based financial firm called SWIFT “which hosts the international computer network that facilitates virtually every banking transaction in the world through an extensive messaging and financial tracking system.” The Obama administration opposed expelling Iran from SWIFT but “Congress once again overrode the White House’s concerns and unanimously passed” legislation in 2012 that “de-SWIFTed” Tehran.

By 2013, such measures, “were crippling Iran’s economy.” Had the pressure been intensified — or even just maintained — who knows what concessions Iran’s rulers might have made to avoid economic crisis and collapse? But Obama eased up on Iran in exchange for an interim agreement. After that, few if any Iranian concessions were forthcoming. Khamenei insisted that his red lines be observed while those laid down by Obama were transgressed — one after another.

In the end, Iran would not even have to acknowledge that it ever had a nuclear weapons program, much less reveal how far that program had progressed. Nevertheless, the Obama administration would agree that Iran “be allowed to build an industrial-scale nuclear program, with hundreds of thousands of machines, after a ten year period of restraint.”

“I have no doubt we avoided a war,” Kerry told the author in an interview early this year. He could be right. Alternatively, what he sees as avoidance could turn out to be only postponement.

Based on faith rather than evidence, Kerry and Obama believe that the Islamic republic will moderate; that it will give up its ambition of establishing a vast new Islamic empire; that it will no longer dream of bringing “death” to America, Israel, Saudi Arabia and other “infidel” nations; that it will not evolve into a more formidable and lethal adversary.

“Obama has wagered that Khamenei and his revolutionary allies won’t outlast the terms of the nuclear agreement,” Solomon concludes. “If they do, the United States risks unleashing an even larger nuclear cascade on the Middle East.” Yes, that’s the wager. Seems like a long shot to me.

Categories: Iran - Green Revolution, Iran - Middle East, Iran - sanctions relief, Iran scam, Obama and Iran
Tags: Iran - Green Revolution, Iran - Middle East, Iran - sanctions relief, Iran Scam, Obama and Iran

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Column One: Obama’s greatest achievement

September 1, 2016

Column One: Obama’s greatest achievement, Jerusalem Post, Caroline B. Glick, September 1, 2016

Obama lies on Iran scam

U.S. President Barack Obama and Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong (not pictured) speak during a press conference at the White House in Washington, U.S., August 2, 2016. (photo credit:REUTERS)

The time for complaining about President Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran has passed. The time has come to overcome the damage enormous damage his signature foreign policy accomplishment has caused.

To understand why this is the case, it is important to understand the breadth and depth of Obama’s failure.

On August 4, during the course of a press conference, Obama gave his interim assessment of his nuclear agreement with Iran.

“It worked,” he insisted.

A year after the deal was signed, Obama argued, events have proven that he was right and the deal’s critics were wrong.

“You’ll recall that there were all these horror stories about how Iran was going to cheat and this wasn’t going to work and Iran was going to get $150 billion to finance terrorism and all these kinds of scenarios, and none of them have come to pass,” he proclaimed.

Obama then snidely swiped at the deal’s opponents saying that it would be “impressive” if the people who criticized the deal would own up to their mistakes and admit that it worked.

As it works out, everything that Obama said about the deal with Iran during his press conference was a lie.

Some of his lies became apparent within hours.

For instance, Obama falsely claimed that Israel now “acknowledges this has been a game changer and Iran has abided by the deal and they no longer have the sort of short-term breakout capacity that would allow them to develop nuclear weapons.”

Hours later, the Defense Ministry issued a stinging rebuke of Obama’s claim, parroted more diplomatically by the Prime Minister’s Office.

Obama’s press conference took place the day after The Wall Street Journal reported that in January 2016, the US sent an unmarked plane to the Tehran airport filled with $400 million in cash, on the same day Iran released four US hostages.

Obama angrily rejected allegations that the cash payment was a ransom payment for the hostages’ release. He insisted that the US had made the payment as the first installment of a $1.7b. payment the administration made to settle an Iranian government lawsuit against America.

Obama claimed that the administration agreed to the settlement at the urging of the Justice Department.

He said his administration was able to settle the dispute only due to the nuclear deal which placed US officials in direct contact with their Iranian counterparts for the first time in decades.

Within a day, Obama’s claims were exposed as lies. It turns out that Justice Department lawyers opposed the cash payout to Iran.

One of the hostages released in January told the media that the Iranians refused to allow the hostages to leave Iran until the airplane with the cash landed in the airport.

The Iranians, for their part, contemptuously mocked Obama, and stated openly that the $400m.

was a ransom payment for the hostages.

Two weeks later, Obama’s State Department admitted that the $400m. was a payment for the hostages.

Obama’s principle claim is that due to his deal, Iran no longer has a short-term nuclear breakout capacity. He also says that in accordance with the deal, Iran has shipped its nuclear materials out of the country. These claims are both untrue and misleading.

On Thursday Reuters reported that Iran did not ship the quantities of low-enriched uranium out of the country in the quantities the deal required.

Last January, when the deadline arrived for Iran to comply with the deal’s clauses calling for it to move its uranium enriched to 3.5 percent and 20 percent out of the country and so enable the US and its European colleagues to cancel UN sanctions against it, it worked out that Iran had failed to comply.

Rather than acknowledge Iran’s failure and maintain the sanctions in accordance with their deal, the Americans and Europeans decided to move the goalpost closer to Iran.

They secretly decreased the amount of uranium the Iranians were required to part with. They then announced triumphantly that they were canceling UN sanctions because Iran had complied with the agreement.

Reuters reported that much of the low-enriched uranium Iran did remove from its territory wasn’t actually removed from its possession. Instead it was transferred to neighboring Oman, where it is held under Iranian guard and control.

Obama of course knows all of this. So his claims that the agreement “worked” are nothing more than a card trick meant to trick the American public.

Obama’s assertion that Iran’s breakout time to a nuclear arsenal has been slowed as a result of his deal is similarly a stretch of the imagination. The Iranians have suspended much of their prior centrifuge spinning. But that is only because they are now directing their efforts to developing and deploying more advanced centrifuges that will be able to enrich uranium to bomb grade material far more rapidly than the centrifuges they were required to retire.

Experts have already placed Iran’s post-deal nuclear breakout time at a mere six months. And Iran can leave the agreement – which it never actually signed or officially agreed to – anytime it wants.

While developing their next generation centrifuges, the Iranians are expanding the range and precision of their ballistic missiles, deploying them and increasing the size of their arsenals. Despite the fact that these actions are prohibited under US law and breach what was initially claimed about the ever-changing nuclear deal, the Obama administration has refused to impose sanctions against Iran, insisting that its actions merely breach the spirit, rather than substance, of the deal.

The administration has had a similar response to Iran’s recent deployment of Russia’s S-300 missile defense battery around its military nuclear site at Fordo. On Sunday Iranian television showed footage of the missiles being set up around the formerly secret site.

As Omri Ceren of the Israel Project noted this week, Iran’s deployment of the S-300 system places it in breach of three US sanctions laws. Despite this, the White House announced on Wednesday that it has no intention of enforcing US law and applying sanctions on Iran. The S-300 missiles can be used both as a defensive system and as an offensive one.

On Tuesday, Tehran announced that it will be launching three satellites in the coming months.

Satellite launches are widely viewed as a means through which Iran is covertly developing a longrange ballistic missile capability. Rather than censure Iran for its actions, the Obama administration insists that such actions, as well as Iran’s recent longrange rocket tests, do not violate the nuclear deal or warrant US action.

Taken separately and together, Iran’s actions since the nuclear deal was officially concluded make clear that it continues to pursue its nuclear program, and indeed, has become more brazen in its nuclear operations than it was before the agreement was announced last year.

In other words, not only has the deal not worked, contrary to Obama’s claims, it has been a colossal failure on every level. The deal’s opponents were entirely right about the dangers it posed and Obama was entirely wrong.

This is true as well in relation to the administration’s qualified promises that the deal would lead to better relations between the US and Iran. As Shoshana and Stephen Bryen noted last week following the Iranian naval assault on the USS Nitze in the Strait of Hormuz, with its repeated harassment of US naval ships traversing the Strait of Hormuz, Iran is clearly practicing its tactic of swarming US naval craft as a preparation for a real strike against them.

The main reason that Iran’s nuclear program is such a grave concern for Israel and for other Middle Eastern states is that the Iranian regime has hegemonic ambitions. It seeks to destroy Israel and dominate the entire region.

Since it concluded the deal with Washington, Iran has surged its forces and massively expanded its power projection throughout the region.

On Thursday the Daily Mail reported that the commonly held belief that Iran commands 16,000 troops in Syria is wrong. According to the National Council of Resistance in Iran, the regime actually commands 60,000 forces in Syria, deployed throughout the country. The entire Syrian army today numbers a mere 50,000 men.

On August 4, Obama mocked claims that Iran would spend its windfall profits of $100b.-$150b.

from the sanctions relief the nuclear deal offered to fund terrorism. Yet, according to the Daily Mail report, to date Iran has spent $100b. on the war in Syria.

The implications of the report are blood curdling.

They mean that despite Obama’s denials, the funds Iran has received as a result of the sanctions relief he brought about through his nuclear deal have paid for Iran’s war in Syria. That war has caused the death of nearly half a million people and forced more than 11 million people to flee their homes.

Obviously, it is important for Americans to know the truth about the Iran deal and its consequences as they consider their votes for Obama’s replacement.

One of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s top candidates for secretary of state is Wendy Sherman.

Sherman was the chief negotiator of Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran.

For Israel, the question of what to do about Iran now is far more urgent than it is for Americans.

Today more and more commentators are voicing concern over the prospect that Obama will support an anti-Israel resolution at the UN Security Council as a parting shot at Israel.

But any such resolution will be small potatoes in comparison to the strategic devastation his nuclear deal, which is his main foreign policy legacy, has caused.

The rapidity of Iran’s advance makes clear that there is no justification for waiting to act until Obama has left office. If it doesn’t act soon, Israel is on the fast track to waking up one morning and discovering it has no means of thwarting the threat.

Indeed, with each passing month, its options for action become more and more limited.

After Israel’s security leadership undermined Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plan to attack Iran’s nuclear installations in 2010 and 2012, Netanyahu settled on a strategy of blocking Obama’s moves to appease Tehran.

That strategy of course failed last summer. Since then, Netanyahu has worked to build an anti-Iranian alliance with the Sunni Arab states. His efforts in this area have clearly met with some measure of success, as witnessed by public statements from prominent Saudis and others.

Whatever that success may be, and whatever the status of that burgeoning alliance of spurned US allies, the fact is that it’s time Israel and its new allies do something more than send signals. Time is a-wasting.

Last spring Brig.-Gen. Hossein Salami, the deputy commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, said, “Today the grounds for the annihilation and collapse of the Zionist regime are more present than ever before.”

Thanks to Obama, he may be right.

It is time for Israel to make him eat his words.

Categories: Iran and Israel, Iran scam, Iranian missiles, Iranian nukes, Israeli security, Obama and Iran, Obama and Iran scam
Tags: Iran and Israel, Iran Scam, Iranian missiles, Iranian nukes, Israeli security, Obama and Iran, Obama and Iran scam

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A Lawless President Made More Secret Deals

September 1, 2016

A Lawless President Made More Secret Deals, Counter Jihad, September 1, 2016

A new report revealed by Reuters shows that there were more secret deals made with Iran, and not reported to Congress, in violation of US law. The President of the United States has knowingly and repeatedly violated a law he himself signed, for the express purpose of avoiding Congressional oversight of his actions mandated both by the law and the Constitution.

During the so-called “Iran Deal” negotiations, it became known that the State Department had agreed to allow Iran to make a “secret side deal” with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to which the United States would not be a party. The intent was to dodge a provision of the law governing the “Iran Deal”‘s negotiation, a law that President Barack Obama had himself signed into law. He signed this into law in the hope of avoiding the Constitutional requirement that the Senate should advise and assent to treaties by a two-thirds majority. The law he negotiated as an alternative to obeying the Constitution required that the entire deal, including any side arrangements, be made available to Congress for consideration before approval.

Congress objected to this first ‘secret deal,’ especially Representatives Tom Cotton and Mike Pompeo. Pompeo said at the time of this revelation, “Not only does this violate the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act, it is asking Congress to agree to a deal that it cannot review.” In a letter to Secretary of State John F. Kerry, he reminded the Secretary that “pursuant to H. Res. 411, the House of Representatives considers the documents transmitted on July 19, 2015 incomplete in light of the fact that the secret side deals between the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the Islamic Republic of Iran were not provided to Congress.”

Now we learn that there were many more such deals, none of which was reported to Congress. In a way, this has been obvious for some time. The IranTruth site reported in July that there were more secret deals, and asked,“Does the President Know?” Jeff Dunetz, writing at the same site, identified two more secret deals specifically by August of last year. French and Iranian officials agreed last summer that the presentation of the deal being made by Secretary Kerry to the US Congress was a distortion of what was being actually negotiated, with the French expressing a concern that the deal was always being weakened in Iran’s favor.

According to Reuters today:

The report is to be published on Thursday by the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security, said the think tank’s president David Albright, a former U.N. weapons inspector and co-author of the report. It is based on information provided by several officials of governments involved in the negotiations, who Albright declined to identify.

Reuters could not independently verify the report’s assertions.

“The exemptions or loopholes are happening in secret, and it appears that they favor Iran,” Albright said.

Among the exemptions were two that allowed Iran to exceed the deal’s limits on how much low-enriched uranium (LEU) it can keep in its nuclear facilities, the report said. LEU can be purified into highly enriched, weapons-grade uranium.

Will Congress continue to accept this lawless erosion of its Constitutional role? Will they, at any point, stand up and assert that the President must at least obey the laws he himself signs? If not, what role does Congress intend to serve? What future is there for the system of checks and balances that once restrained the executive branch from imperial ambitions?

The matter is even more important than that. The so-called “Iran Deal” has been a manifest disaster for the interests of the United States abroad. Tearing it up is one of the five most crucial steps that the United States can take right now. (The pertinent segment of the video provided below begins at 1:14 — DM)

Congress must reassert its role in balancing what has become a lawless executive branch. It must do so because the Constitution requires it, because the stability of the Republic requires it, but also because this particular deal has badly damaged American interests. A great deal rides on whether the legislative branch has the political will to reaffirm its Constitutional role in the United States.

Categories: Iran - secret deal, Iran scam, Obama and Iran, U.S. Congress, U.S. Constitution
Tags: Iran - secret deal, Iran Scam, Obama and Iran, U.S. Congress, U.S. Constitution

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Iran: No Range Limit for Our New Ballistic Missiles

August 29, 2016

Iran: No Range Limit for Our New Ballistic Missiles, Clarion Project, Meira Svirski, August 29, 2016

Iran-Missile-HP_9

An Iranian missile test (Photo: © Reuters)

Iran has successfully played America as the fool, challenging the U.S. to stand up to its belligerence. Every time America backs down, by either making excuses for the Islamic Republic (i.e., by redefining the deal) or ignoring their latest outrage, Iran becomes more empowered.

Sanctions relief let the Iranian genie out of the bottle. Now, the terror-supporting and oppressive regime is taking its place on the world stage unrestrained and unopposed.

********************

The Iranian defense minister recently pronounced that the Islamic Republic has “no limit for the range” of the ballistic missiles it is developing.

In making the pronouncement, General Hossein Dehqan also said that Iran is now on par with world standards for most of its weapons and military equipment, specifically, that “production of the national individual weapons and efforts to improve the quality and precision-striking power of ballistic missiles are among the defense ministry’s achievements…”

One of the advanced weapons Iran has developed is a ballistic missile that deploys multiple warheads against a single target. As the government-aligned Fars News Agency reported, “This makes for an efficient area attack weapon.”

(Never mind that just three months ago, that the state-owned IranianPress TV announced that “all these advancements on the military level are only for defensive reasons.”)

In addition, Iran has now deployed the long-awaited Russian-made, long-range S-300 missile system. The system was deployed to protect the country’s Fordo nuclear facility, which the commander of Iran’s air force calls paramount “in all circumstances.”

Western officials, who tried to block the delivery of the missile system, said that once in place, the S-300 would essentially eliminate the military option to stop Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.

The nuclear deal made with Iran and the world powers was sold to the public as a way to contain not just Iran’s nuclear weapons program, but its ballistic missile program as well.

Ballistic missiles are mainly used to deliver nuclear warheads. Under the terms of the agreement we were told that the current UN restrictions on Iran’s ballistic missile program would remain in effect for eight years, including forbidding Iran from testing of ballistic missiles.

Less than two months after the deal was formalized, a senior figure in the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), Brigadier General Amirali Hajizadeh, announced, “Some wrongly think Iran has suspended its ballistic missile programs in the last two years and has made a deal on its missile program … We will have a new ballistic missile test in the near future that will be a thorn in the eyes of our enemies.”

As far as the defense minister Dehqan, commenting about the restrictions, he said, “To follow our defense programs, we don’t ask permission from anyone.”

After the first ballistic missile test conducted by Iran after the agreement was made, the U.S. administration backtracked, saying that the test was really not a violation of the nuclear agreement but there were “strong indications” that the test violated UN restrictions.

The second ballistic missile test came as U.S. Vice President Joe Biden was visiting Israel. Painted on the two missiles (which had the capability of reaching the Jewish state) were written the word in Hebrew, “Israel should be wiped out.”

Hajizadeh said at the time, “The 1,240-mile range of our missiles is to confront the Zionist regime. IRNA, Iran’s state news agency, reported the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps as saying the test had Iran’s enemies “shivering from the roar” of the missiles.

For his part, Biden said at the time, the U.S. would “act” if Iran broke the nuclear agreements.

Judging from its lack of action, the U.S. ostensibly does not count this as a violation of the agreement, despite clear evidence to the contrary.

Since the signing of the nuclear agreement Iran has engaged in aprovocative “cat and mouse” game with the U.S.

In addition, to the ballistic missile tests, since signing the agreement:

● In September, Iran simulated a missile attack on a US aircraft carrier in an agitprop video titled “If Any War happens.”

● In October, just three days after one of the ballistic tests, Iranian state TV aired unprecedented footage of an underground missile base.

● In December, Iran tested rockets with live fire within 1,500 yards of American warships in the Strait of Hormuz

● In January, Iran test-fired an upgraded surface-to surface cruise missile in a new set of wargames code-named Velayat-94

● In January, an unarmed Iranian surveillance drone flew near U.S. and French aircraft carriers in the Gulf, managing to take “precise” photos while the ship was involved in an ongoing naval drill. An Iranian submarine was also detected in close proximity to the aircraft carriers.

● In January, Iran captured 10 U.S. sailors whose boat had strayed into Iranian territorial waters. The soldiers were humiliated and held for 15 hours. Iran has since used the incident to mocked America in videos and plays.

“Without understanding Iranian culture, it is impossible to understand what is going on,” said Harold Rhode, an expert on Islamic culture who worked for the Pentagon for 28 years, in an interview with The Algemeiner. “Nothing is in and of itself. The way negotiations work among Iranians is that an agreement as we understand it means nothing. It is nothing more than a step along the way to getting what they want.”

“From an Iranian cultural point of view, at all times there is a balance — ‘Are you giving it or are you getting it?’ … It’s simply domination; it’s simply power.”

Iran has successfully played America as the fool, challenging the U.S. to stand up to its belligerence. Every time America backs down, by either making excuses for the Islamic Republic (i.e., by redefining the deal) or ignoring their latest outrage, Iran becomes more empowered.

Sanctions relief let the Iranian genie out of the bottle. Now, the terror-supporting and oppressive regime is taking its place on the world stage unrestrained and unopposed.

Categories: Iran scam, Iranian missiles, Obama and Iran, Obama's foreign failures, Russian missiles
Tags: Iran Scam, Iranian missiles, Obama and Iran, Obama's foreign failures, Russian missiles

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Secrets of the Iran Ransom

August 28, 2016

Secrets of the Iran Ransom, Power Line, Scott Johnson August 28, 2016

At the New York Sun last week, Claudia Rosett tentatively reported the mechanics of the Obama administration’s payment of the $1.3 billion tranche of the ransom to Iran. She discovered what Andy McCarthy calls “a bizarre string” of 13 identical money transfers of $99,999,999.99 each — all of them one cent less than $100 million — paid out of an obscure Treasury Department stash known as the “Judgment Fund.”

In the aggregate, Andy notes, the transfers amount to 13 cents shy of the $1.3 billion the State Department claims Iran was owed in “interest” from the $400 million that our government had been holding since the shah deposited it in a failed arms deal just prior to the Khomeini revolution. The administration added a fourteenth payment of $10 million — not necessarily for good measure. We don’t know why and the administration isn’t saying.

The administration’s payments to Iran bear the earmarks of a structured transaction intended to avoid detection by the authorities. Structuring deposits or withdrawals in this fashion to avoid bank reporting is a federal crime (the one that ensnared Dennis Hastert). Federally regulated financial institutions are required to look for such structured transactions and to report them. That’s undoubtedly how Dennis Hastert was caught.

What is going on in the matter of the payments to our enemies in Iran? Andy notes:

The administration refuses to divulge any further information about the $1.7 billion the president acknowledges paying the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism. Grilled on Wednesday about how Obama managed to pay the final $1.3 billion installment — particularly given the president’s claim that it is not possible to send Tehran a check or wire-transfer — State Department spokesman Mark Toner decreed that the administration would continue “withholding this information” in order “to protect confidentiality.”

Whose confidentiality? The mullahs’? That of the intermediaries the president used? Whose privacy takes precedence over our right to know how Obama funneled our money to our enemies?

Good question. I can’t believe that Andy is the only man asking it, as he does in “Why is Obama stonewalling on details of the $1.7 billion in Iransom payoff.”

Categories: Iran - hostages, Iran - ransom payments, Iran scam, Obama and Iran
Tags: Iran - hostages, Iran - ransom payments, Iran Scam, Obama and Iran

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White House Echo Chamber Architect to Keynote Pro-Iran Lobby Conference

August 25, 2016

White House Echo Chamber Architect to Keynote Pro-Iran Lobby Conference, Washington Free Beacon, Adam Kredo, August 25, 2016

Ben Rhodes (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais, File)

The Sept. 25 event also is being co-sponsored by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, a philanthropic group that has been criticized for funding anti-Israel activities and organizations that support boycotts of the Jewish state. The fund bankrolls some of the leading backers of the global BDS movement against Israel, which has raised concerns among some that the administration is breaking its promises to oppose this movement.

The NIAC event is being viewed as another sign that the White House is seeking to boost these organizations in return for their efforts to push the nuclear deal and support the pro-Iran “echo chamber.”

***********************

The senior White House official who bragged about creating a pro-Iran “echo chamber” to mislead Americans about last summer’s nuclear agreement is scheduled to keynote a conference sponsored by an organization that has long been accused of acting as a pro-Tehran lobbying front.

Ben Rhodes, a top national security adviser to President Obama, is slated to be the keynote speaker at an upcoming gathering hosted by the National Iranian American Council, or NIAC, which played a key role in bolstering the nuclear agreement and has long operated under suspicion that it acts as Tehran’s lobbying shop.

NIAC

Rhodes has been engulfed in a growing scandal following the revelation that he enlisted a roster of journalists and experts to spin the public in favor of the deal.

Outside organizations such as NIAC and the Ploughshares Fund, which is co-sponsoring the upcoming conference, were cited as key parts of the White House’s effort to mislead the public about the deal.

The Sept. 25 event also is being co-sponsored by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, a philanthropic group that has been criticized for funding anti-Israel activities and organizations that support boycotts of the Jewish state. The fund bankrolls some of the leading backers of the global BDS movement against Israel, which has raised concerns among some that the administration is breaking its promises to oppose this movement.

The NIAC event is being viewed as another sign that the White House is seeking to boost these organizations in return for their efforts to push the nuclear deal and support the pro-Iran “echo chamber.”

“Pro-Iran lobbies like NIAC were helpful to Ben Rhodes when he created his echo chamber to sell the Iran nuclear deal and the Iran money-for-hostages deal,” said one senior foreign policy consultant who has worked with Congress on the Iran deal. “It’s only fair that Rhodes would return the favor by keynoting NIAC’s conference. It’s not clear what he’ll talk about more: Iran developing its nuclear program, Iran expanding across the region, or Iran seizing more American hostages including those with close links to NIAC itself.”

The NIAC conference also will be attended by Rep. Jared Huffman (D., Calif.), an Iran deal backer, according to an invitation for the event circulated by NIAC.

NIAC makes note of Rhodes’ efforts to deepen diplomacy with the Islamic Republic in its invitation.

The event’s top billed sponsors include Ploughshares and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.

Ploughshares, a longtime funder of pro-Iran organizations and media outlets, has found itself on defense in recent months following disclosure of its role in Rhodes’ “echo chamber.”

Ploughshares funded writers and organizations in order to create a network of Iran deal “validators” who could influence public opinion at the White House’s behest.

Most recently, the Washington Free Beacon disclosed that a Washington Post contributor who touted the administration’s $400 million payment to Iran had been funded by Ploughshares. Neither the Post nor the writer disclosed this fact.

Ploughshares also moved money to National Public Radio to influence its coverage of the Iran deal.

Categories: BDS, Ben Rhodes, Iran scam, Israel, National Iranian American Council, Obama and Iran, Obama and Israel
Tags: BDS, Ben Rhodes, Iran Scam, Israel, National Iranian American Council, Obama and Iran, Obama and Israel

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