Congress Must Hold Obama Accountable for His Deception Over Iran

NATIONAL REVIEW

by ANDREW C. MCCARTHY

One can imagine hearing such counsel from a contemporary United States senator on the receiving end of President Obama’s “full disclosure” of the nuclear deal with Iran. But the admonition actually came from James Iredell, a champion of the Constitution’s ratification, who was later appointed to the Supreme Court by President George Washington.

Iredell was addressing the obligations the new Constitution imposed on the president in the arena of international affairs. Notwithstanding the chief executive’s broad powers to “regulate all intercourse with foreign powers,” it would be the president’s “duty to impart to the Senate every material intelligence he receives.” Indeed, among the most egregious offenses a president could commit would be fraudulently inducing senators “to enter into measures injurious to their country, and which they would not have consented to had the true state of things been disclosed to them.”

A little over a year ago, I recounted Iredell’s cautionary words in Faithless Execution. They echo an instructive illustration offered by James Madison, the Constitution’s principal author: If the president were “to commit any thing so atrocious” as to fraudulently rig Senate approval of an international agreement, he would “be impeached and convicted.”

Interestingly, the perfidy in Madison’s hypothetical involved summoning into session only senators favorably disposed toward a formal treaty that the president wanted approved. That was more plausible in the late 18th century: Under the Constitution, a treaty may be approved by “two thirds of the senators present” for the vote; and back then, senators coming from far and wide could not fly to the nation’s capital at the drop of a hat.

The hypothetical is telling as we consider Obama’s Iran deal. The Constitution makes treason a ground for impeachment, but it seems to have been outside Madison’s contemplation that a president would actually be so insidious as to use his foreign-affairs power to give aid and comfort to an enemy of the United States. On that score, note that as soon as Obama’s deal was announced, not only was Iran’s foreign minister vowing to continue funding jihadist terror; the regime’s “supreme leader,” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was also extolling the continued Iranian call for “Death to America.”

Madison could not fathom a president who undermines the Constitution’s treaty requirements by the ruse of labeling a treaty an “agreement” or a “joint plan of action.” Still less could he imagine a president who resorts to chicanery in communicating the terms of an international agreement to the Congress. Such duplicity must have seemed inconceivable.

Yet now, it is not just conceivable. It is happening:

Obama’s original stated commitment to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear-weapons power has deteriorated into a deal that enables Iran to become a nuclear-weapons power by abiding by the deal’s terms. The mullahs’ inevitable cheating will merely speed up matters; the outcome is already certain.

Obama is willfully providing material support to the mullahs’ terrorism (a felony violation of federal law) — the deal will inject over $100 billion into Iran’s economy, and Iran brags that it will continue its open and notorious funding of Hezbollah and other anti-American, anti-Western, and anti-Israel “allies” (while the administration splutters that, gee whiz, curbing terrorism was not part of the negotiations).

Obama not only lifts restrictions on Iran’s traffic in ballistic missiles and conventional weapons (which were also not supposed to be part of the negotiations) but also looks the other way while Russia sells the mullahs hundreds of sophisticated surface-to-air missiles — missiles that will be used against American forces when, inevitably, a future president decides to deal differently with our enemies.

Obama’s deal, rationalized as necessary to delay (but no longer to forbid) Iran’s nuclearization, obliges the United States to protect Iranian nuclear facilities from sabotage — i.e., the deal makes America the scourge of erstwhile allies like Israel, with which we have colluded in impeding our actual enemy’s nuclear progress

Yet, however shocking they may be, these acknowledged concessions do not fully convey the depth of the president’s betrayal. After a few days of misdirection, administration officials now admit that there are “side deals” that the administration has not revealed to Congress and does not intend to make public.

So far, we know of two “side deals” — who knows how many more there may actually be? As the Center for Security Policy’s Fred Fleitz writes in National Review, they involve (a) a full accounting of Iran’s prior nuclear activities (many of which are believed to have been in blatant violation of international law) and (b) access to the Parchin military base, where Iran has conducted explosive testing related to nuclear missiles.

Apropos of these subjects, recall that the administration repeatedly promised there would be no deal, that the president would walk away from the table, unless Iran agreed to a rigorous inspection regiment. Such a regiment minimally requires: (a) complete disclosure of the “possible military dimensions” of Iran’s past nuclear work, in order to establish a baseline for evaluating future conduct, and (b) the ability to conduct credible snap inspections of nuclear facilities.

Despite the administration’s chest-beating about these “red lines,” the Iranians remained alternatively coy and intransigent: When not lying about what cards they were willing to show, the mullahs insisted that Americans would not be permitted to snoop around their country and interfere in their military affairs.

Someone had to cave in, and — you could set your watch on it — that someone is Obama (if, that is, you are one of those who believed he was being honest in the first place). Thus the problem: how to cover up this decisive surrender within the surrender?

So, in his signature “if you like your health-care plan, you can keep your health-care plan” style, the president has come up with a fraudulent scheme: use the IAEA (the International Atomic Energy Agency) as a smokescreen. His administration now cynically claims that these critical agreement components — the rationale for lifting American sanctions on and making American commitments to the “Death to America” regime — actually have nothing to do with America . . . they are strictly between Tehran and the IAEA. Translation: Blame the IAEA, not Obama, for the abandonment of Obama’s core commitments.

This would be laughable if it were not so offensive — and so perilous. Put aside that the Constitution does not permit the U.S. government to delegate American national security to anyone. The IAEA is not an independent actor. It is an international bureaucracy forged by the United States in the 1950s. Not only is the U.S. is a staple of its governing board; the American people underwrite over 25 percent of its budget. Furthermore, the IAEA reports to the United Nations (to which the American taxpayers’ contribution also far exceeds that of other countries) and, specifically, to the U.N. Security Council (of which the United States remains the dominant permanent member).

Now consider this: Under cover of this IAEA ruse, Obama ran to the Security Council and rammed through a resolution commencing implementation of his Iran deal before Congress or the American people could consider it. He thus undermined American sovereignty and the Constitution by scheming to impose an international-law fait accompli. And he thus undermined American national security by transferring his inspection commitments to an international agency that he knows is not close to being capable of executing them — an agency that will be further hampered by notice restrictions that, as Charles Krauthammer concludes, render the inspections “farcical” in any event.

The Constitution forbids providing aid and comfort to America’s enemies. And the Framers’ notion that a president would be punishable for deceiving Congress regarding the conduct of foreign affairs meant that lawmakers would be obliged to use their constitutional powers to protect the United States — not merely shriek on cable television as if they were powerless spectators.

Well?

— 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.

Enabling Iran's Nuclear Program while Vowing to Prevent Iran from Acquiring Nuclear Weapons

With his Tisha B'Av syndrome statement, Isaac Herzog defined the word opportunist

YNET

Opposition leader Isaac Herzog believes that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu "is using the Tisha B'Av syndrome" to scare the people of Israel, the Zionist Union wrote on his Facebook on Saturday.

"Netanyahu is slowly sowing deep anxieties into the hearts of the nation, and has an unbalanced effect on our national emotions. It must stop," Herzog wrote.

Tisha B'Av, an annual fast day which commemorates the destruction of both the First and Second Temples in Jerusalem, will be marked on Sunday

In the Jerusalem Post article “The Gospel according to Lapid”, Sarah Honig wrote:

“Opportunism according to the dictionary definition is “the conscious policy and practice of taking selfish advantage of circumstances – with little regard for principles or consequences. Opportunist actions are expedient actions guided primarily by self-interested motives.”

Apparently, Herzog is no better than Lapid. Either Herzog understands the threat coming from Iran, and that therefore Netanyahu is telling the truth  ( see below the list of threats ), or he does not. If he does, he is an opportunist. If he does not, what is he doing as the leader of the opposition?

Iran vs. Israel: Who's Making the Threats?

The Gospel according to Lapid

Does Lapid truly believe that Netanyahu should have taken a leaf out of Edvard Benes’s book, sat down dejectedly on the edge of his bed and sobbed his heart out?

By SARAH HONIG 

Is Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu personally culpable for the atrocious deal which US President Barack Obama and his multinational cohort contracted with Iran? Exuding extraordinary opportunism, MK Ya’ir Lapid screams just that into every available microphone.

Opportunism according to the dictionary definition is “the conscious policy and practice of taking selfish advantage of circumstances – with little regard for principles or consequences. Opportunist actions are expedient actions guided primarily by self-interested motives.”

Lapid’s fortunes had flopped spectacularly in the March elections. His political bankruptcy would have been all the more crushing had Labor posed a more credible alternative. As was, Lapid avoided utter ruin only because his list afforded a midway shelter for those who couldn’t bring themselves to vote for either large party.

This leaves Lapid with the pressing need to keep his name in the headlines and make political hay of whatever transpires – like the signing of the Vienna deal on the ayatollahs’ nukes.

Relations between Israel and Obama were sweet, avers Lapid, until Netanyahu singularly soured them by kicking up superfluous fuss. Had Netanyahu not taken Israel’s case to the joint session of Congress, the love would have stayed syrupy.

Lapid curiously contends that Netanyahu riled Obama to the point of rendering him irrepressibly vindictive. The nightmare appeasement of Iran is therefore a disaster Bibi alone inflicted upon Israel’s populace. Lapid’s one-dimensional perspective precludes the suggestion that Obama might have curbed his umbrage.

It’s natural and quite understandable for Obama to take his frustration with Bibi out on all of us.

In Lapid’s simplistic world, moreover, it wasn’t unthinkable that Netanyahu keep mum about how Obama imperils Israel. From here it’s but a short hop to Lapid’s clamor for that tried and worn Israeli staple – the inquiry commission.

It’s the hackneyed Israeli way of settling political scores and it resonates with the more superficial subscribers to groupthink among us.

The inquiry puts the accused party in the frame a priori (and in the Lapid universe it’s definitely not Obama), while offering the masses amusements along the pitiless conventions of ancient Rome’s gladiatorial matches. The populist appeal is undeniable.

Presumably, we can better cope with the challenges ahead if our collective attention is diverted to judicial showdowns about who bears guilt for Obama’s purported grudge and retaliation.

We might have entertained different expectations from an ex-minister who served in Netanyahu’s own cabinet and who, before his belated epiphany, never complained in real time about the pain Bibi causes Obama. We might even have expected Lapid to comment about how treacherous and wrongheaded the entire Obamaesque view of the Mideast is.

Had Lapid not lost the plot, he might have realized that the enemy isn’t Netanyahu and that Obama has taken America from a friendly orientation toward Israel to one that is categorically inimical, his misleading blandishments notwithstanding.

In actual fact, Obama is no ally of Israel and already wasn’t before he and Netanyahu locked horns for the first time.

This has nothing to do with Netanyahu and everything to do with Obama. From the outset of his first term, Obama aided and abetted those forces in Islam most viscerally hostile to Israel, most belligerent and most vituperative about any hint of coexistence.

The betrayal of Israel is only one facet of Obama’s calamitous strategy.

We might have expected Lapid to grasp the elementary distinction between the national interests of both Israelis and Americans (which mesh perfectly) and between the Obama Administration’s agenda (which negates Israel’s most basic survival interests as well as the basic interests of the American people).

The very least which we must expect of Israel’s prime minister is that he would sound the alarm – tug as hard as he can on the world’s fire-bells. The fact that the international community is loath to listen doesn’t make the warnings any less crucial.

Does Lapid truly believe that Netanyahu should have taken a leaf out of the Edvard Benes book, sat down dejectedly on the edge of his bed and sobbed his heart out? That’s what the president of Czechoslovakia did in 1938 after the disgraceful signing of the Munich Agreement (which Benes knew had sealed his country’s fate).

To blame Netanyahu for the alleged failure to preempt the Obama-engineered sellout is as intellectually offensive as blaming Benes for the failure to prevent the Chamberlain-engineered sellout of his day.

Prolific historian and Benes-contemporary Edward Taborsky described Benes as “the unfortunate victim of an exceptionally adverse confluence of circumstances.”

Czechoslovakia could not be saved, not because of Benes’s failure, but because of “the absence of proper Western support when it was most needed.”

Like Netanyahu, Benes tirelessly tried to warn his country’s disloyal allies of the disaster they were about to unleash.

Taborsky notes the “rich flow of Benes’s rhetoric… He would endeavor to wear down and overwhelm his opponent by a steady avalanche of logical argument.”

The same can be said of Netanyahu but here the resemblance ends.

Benes was so accommodating that “his gentleness of heart and his known addiction to compromise became serious weaknesses. There are occasions when righteous anger and brutal frankness serve one’s cause better than tolerance,” Taborsky concluded, almost as if he were referring to Netanyahu.

“Once in a while,” he wrote, “the need may even arise to burn all one’s bridges and make a last win-or-die stand. Such behavior was utterly alien to Benes; he would have considered it foolhardy, an unwarranted gamble which no responsible statesman could afford.”

In other words, Benes behaved vis-à-vis Chamberlain just as Lapid intimates that Netanyahu should have behaved vis-àvis Obama. But Benes’s mild manners did him little good. Contrary to Lapid’s sophomoric contentions, a compliant temperament doesn’t necessarily temper realpolitik duplicity.

Chamberlain is popularly portrayed as having abandoned Czechoslovakia out of naiveté but, like Obama at present, he was utterly nasty to anyone who got in the way of appeasement. In his address to the British people on September 27, 1938 – a couple of fateful days before the signing of the Munich Agreement – Chamberlain made it seem that Czechoslovakia is the troublemaker, that it harasses Europe’s fellow-democracies with impertinent expectations: “We cannot in all circumstances undertake to involve the whole British Empire in war simply on her [Czechoslovakia’s] account. If we have to fight it must be on larger issues than that.” With a few name-switches, we can almost hear Obama saying the same about Israel.

The Obama-Chamberlain analogy isn’t novel but few may realize just how deep the resemblance in reasoning and rhetoric runs. Obama’s attitude to troublesome little Israel is chillingly like Chamberlain’s was vis-à-vis the unfortunate Czechs. Listen to how Chamberlain defended his perfidy: “Since I first went to Berchtesgaden, more than 20,000 letters and telegrams have come to No. 10, Downing Street. Of course, I have been able to look at a tiny fraction of them, but I have seen enough to know that the people who wrote did not feel that they had such a cause for which to fight, if they were asked to go to war in order that the Sudeten Germans might not join the Reich.”

With a few name-switches, we can almost hear Obama saying something similar about the American people’s aversion to conflict.

The Czechs, Chamberlain stressed in his day, aren’t popular with his constituents: “That is how they are feeling. That is my answer to those who say that we should have told Germany weeks ago that, if her army crossed the border of Czechoslovakia, we should be at war with her. We had no treaty obligations and no legal obligations to Czechoslovakia and if we had said that, we feel that we would have received no support from the people of this country. “ Chamberlain then went on: “To accuse us of having by that advice betrayed the Czechoslovakian State is simply preposterous. What we did was to save her from annihilation and give her a chance of new life as a new State, which involves the loss of territory and fortifications, but may perhaps enable her to enjoy in the future and develop a national existence under a neutrality and security comparable to that which we see in Switzerland today.”

We already hear Obama similarly contending that he is only doing the right thing by the Jewish state. Without undue cerebral contortions, we can almost hear him crow about saving us and giving us unappreciative Israelis “a chance of a new life…” to enable us “to enjoy in the future and develop a national existence under a neutrality and security comparable to that which we see in Switzerland today.”

On the brink of one of the most tragic blunders of the modern era, Chamberlain resorted to upbeat hyperboles the likes of which are today immodestly enunciated by Obama (aside from updated idioms): “Therefore, I think the Government deserve the approval of this House for their conduct of affairs in this recent crisis which has saved Czechoslovakia from destruction and Europe from Armageddon.”

Opportunists have a hard time owning up that there are events in human annals that even the best efforts of the best leader cannot prevent. Such admissions are intrinsically counterintuitive to opportunist aims.

Indeed, the truth itself is counterproductive to opportunist ploys. The truth is that Benes couldn’t have undone the combined cynical interplay of the appeasement-intent governments that chose to sacrifice his country. Likewise, Netanyahu could not have undone the combined cynical interplay of the greedy governments who disingenuously deny sacrificing the Jewish state.

The difference, though, is that whereas Benes wept and went into exile, Netanyahu isn’t about to give up. Therefore Obama dislikes Israel even more than Chamberlain was peeved by Czechoslovakia.

www.sarahhonig.com Debunking the Bull, Sarah Honig’s book, was recently published by Gefen.

***

When the meeting broke up at 1:30 am, noted Schmidt,” Chamberlain bid a hearty farewell to the Führer.” As he left the Dreesen, a newspaperman intercepted him to ask: “Is it hopeless, sir?” Chamberlain replied: “I would not like to say that. It is up to the Czechs now.” In other words, peace was possible unless the Czechs stubbornly insisted on defending their homeland.

From The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Alone, 1932-1940 by William Manchester,p 343

Chamberlain to reporter: It is up to the Czechs now. Hague to Israel: Don't undermine Iran nuclear deal

Arming all sides for nuclear war

Iran is merely another front in exactly the same war against civilization.

By MELANIE PHILLIPS 

The “Special Relationship” between America and Britain clearly has one little-known attribute. It inflicts a lethal paralysis on the non-American partner.

Strikingly, Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron has been increasingly showing that he “gets it” on domestic Islamic extremism.

He has also evolved into the most pro-Israel leader in Europe.

Yet at the same time he has signed up to the appalling farce of the US-led surrender to Iran, thus putting Britain as well as America, Israel and much of the world at risk. So how can he “get it” about bits of what he correctly terms “the struggle of our generation,” but not the rest of it? In a landmark speech he gave earlier this week on Islamic extremism, Cameron showed he is beginning to understand the threat from the Islamic jihad.

True, he repeated the presumptuous mantra that Islamism was “not true Islam.” It would surely be more appropriate to say that Islamism is a fanatical interpretation of Islam rooted in the religion.

And as Cameron went on to make clear, he understands that this indeed is the problem because he boldly placed himself squarely behind those Muslims seeking to bring about an Islamic reformation. To deny that Islamist violence had anything to do with Islam, he said, meant “you disempower the critical reforming voices; the voices that are challenging the fusing of religion and politics; the voices that want to challenge the scriptural basis which extremists claim to be acting on.”

Absolutely.

He also understood that within Islam there was a “spectrum of extremism.” As he said, it was not enough for Muslims to say they abhorred ISIS (Islamic State).

“We’ve got to show that if you say, ‘Yes I condemn terror – but the kuffar are inferior,’ or, ‘Violence in London isn’t justified, but suicide bombs in Israel are a different matter’ – then you too are part of the problem.”

Wow. This was the second time recently that Cameron identified Britain with Israeli victims of terrorism – a bold move in a country where any expression of public support for Israel elicits from the political and cultural elite a sharp intake of breath.

And he went even further by stressing that a key factor behind Islamic extremism was the Muslim world’s paranoia “that Jews exercise malevolent power; or that Western powers, in concert with Israel, are deliberately humiliating Muslims, because they aim to destroy Islam.”

This identification of Muslim anti-Jewish hatred with anti-Western jihadi violence is a crucial understanding. And nowhere is this deranged connection more evident than in the genocidal ravings by the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Yet this same David Cameron is supporting a so-called deal which commits Britain, the US and others to help put nuclear weapons into the hands of those same genocidal Islamists.

If the P5+1 negotiators had deliberately set out to produce an Orwellian negation of every single thing they purported to be doing, making themselves appear guilty of criminal cynicism, treachery or utter imbecility, they could not have exceeded the terms of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action finalized in Vienna.

This plan has endorsed Iran, the West’s sworn enemy and the world’s principal sponsor of terrorism, as a nuclear threshold state.

The plan allows Iran to keep its nuclear program intact. At best it will delay its nuclear weapons breakout capacity by 10 years.

Crucially, it enables Iran to avoid inspection of all its nuclear sites – probably allowing it to hold the inspectors at bay for months.

Furthermore, the plan is drafted with no acknowledgment of Iran’s murderous behavior.

So with sanctions set to be relaxed, some $150 billion will be released for the regime to boost armaments to Hamas, Hezbollah and anti-West forces in Yemen and Iraq.

Incomprehensibly, the US-led negotiators have also agreed to lift the UN arms embargo – on Iranian ballistic missiles whose only purpose is to hit America and Europe.

Even more surreally still, the US, Britain and the rest have actually pledged to help Iran thwart any attempts to undermine its nuclear program, including sabotage.

Since precisely such clandestine activities have been carried out for years by either Israel, the US or British special forces or a combination of all three in a desperate attempt to slow down the Iranian nuclear program, this commitment is simply beyond belief.

It turns the US, Britain and the rest from being ineffectually committed to thwarting Iran’s nuclear weapons program into actively conniving at the production of the genocide bomb and the ramping up of Iranian terrorism around the world.

The US revealed its true intentions when it declared that it would now supply both Israel and Saudi Arabia with extra weapons to protect themselves against the Iranian threat.

But since the Obama administration never stops claiming that its plan will neutralize the Iranian threat, why give Saudi and Israel this extra protection? The brutal and terrible answer is that what America, Britain and the rest are in reality now doing is helping arm all sides in the region for nuclear war.

Oh – and Iran hasn’t even signed this nondeal.

So it is a nonexistent non-deal, aka total capitulation by America to an enemy of humanity.

We know why President Obama has done this. As a left-wing ideologue with a pathologically racist chip on his shoulder against white society, he believes that peace and justice will be advanced by empowering the presumed historic victims of America.

Thus embraced by the family of nations, Iran will supposedly turn into a model global citizen. The fatuity of this delusion is being underlined by even more bellicose rhetoric issuing from the apocalypse-now fanatics of the Iranian regime.

But that hardly explains why David Cameron is going along with this suicidal farce. One might speculate that he doesn’t want to split with Britain’s special ally, the US. But I believe there’s a yet deeper obstacle to realism.

The prime minister is a particular and distinctive type of Englishman: decent, humane, rational – but insular. When he came into office he knew nothing and seemed to care less about foreign matters. So he went along with the foreign policy establishment’s instinctive dislike of Israel and appeasement of the Islamic world.

He has been shocked into changing his attitude by recent events – the rise of ISIS and its attraction for so many young British Muslims; the atrocities just across the English Channel at Charlie Hebdo and the kosher grocery store; the slaughter of British tourists in Tunisia.

But he still doesn’t see the bigger geopolitical picture. He doesn’t see that, far from helping the West against ISIS, Iran is merely another front in exactly the same war against civilization.

He doesn’t see that the need to destroy the Iranian regime is part of the same “struggle of our generation.”

He doesn’t see it because, unlike ISIS, the Iranian leaders are the most manipulative and sophisticated dissemblers and long-game players in the world. Presented with naive, decent Englishmen and delusional American ideologues, the Iranians play them for the suckers they are.

Someone should help David Cameron join up the dots, and fast.

Melanie Phillips is a columnist for The Times (UK)

***

It could well be that Melanie Phillips is right. However, Colonel Richard Kemp the former commander of British forces in Afghanistan said the following at the Stop Iran Rally two days ago: “Unless stopped, Iran will develop a nuclear bomb and Iran will use that nuclear bomb”.

If Kemp gets it, how come the PM does not? True, Richard Kemp was attached to the Cabinet Office at the time Cameron was the Leader of the Opposition in 2006, but surely Kemp's views on Iran were known.

The Iran deal – moronic, myopic, malevolent, mendacious

 The most disingenuous contention by supporters of the agreement is that its opponents offered no better alternative

.

By MARTIN SHERMAN 

Our goal is to get Iran to recognize it needs to give up its nuclear program and abide by the UN resolutions that have been in place...the deal we’ll accept is: They end their nuclear program. It’s very straightforward.
– Barack Hussein Obama, October 2012, presidential election debate

I don’t think that any of us thought we were just imposing these sanctions for the sake of imposing them. We did it because we knew that it would hopefully help Iran dismantle its nuclear program. That was the whole point of the [sanctions] regime.
– John Kerry, before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, December 2013 

As details emerge on the deal concluded with Iran last week in Vienna, the full extent of its calamitous significance is coming to light. Indeed, it appears that when, shortly after the announcement of the agreement, Benjamin Netanyahu described it as a “stunning, historic mistake,” he was grossly understating the case.

 (Forlorn) hope & (disastrous) change

What took place in the Austrian capital was nothing less than a catastrophic failure of strategic resolve on the part of the US-led West. It was a craven capitulation on a calamitous scale, which, as time passes, looks less like an unintended mistake and more like an act of deliberate design.

After all, there was an enormous disparity of power and wealth between the protagonists, between the economically emaciated Iran, on the one hand, and the wealthy industrial powers on the other. Yet the side that desperately needed the deal, Iran, prevailed over the side that didn’t, but which desperately wanted it, the P5+1.

The result was an appalling document without a single redeeming feature.

It will not accomplish any of the goals that it purports to achieve. Likewise, it will not preclude any of perils it purports to prevent.

As such it might be seen as grotesque perversion of the slogan “Hope and Change” that swept Obama to power: For while its success is predicated on forlorn hopes of Iranian compliance, it ushers in the virtual certainty of disastrous change in Iranian capabilities.

‘... you’re going to hear a lot of dishonest arguments’ 

During his July 18 address to the American nation, Obama extolled the alleged merits of the Iran deal, alerting viewers: “... still, you’re going to hear a lot of overheated and often dishonest arguments about it.”

He is, of course, quite right. However, many – if not most – the “dishonest arguments” come from him – and his sycophantic minions, who, with almost Pavlovian reflexes, endorse any claptrap the White House might happen to claim.

Indeed, Obama and his administration’s officials have violated virtually every principle that they laid out in the past as to the nature of any acceptable agreement, and have grossly misrepresented the “achievements” of the one eventually conceded.

As the opening excerpts demonstrate, barely a year-and-half ago, the unequivocal goal of the Obama administration was the termination of the Iranian nuclear program and the dismantling of its nuclear facilities – as specified in six preceding UN resolutions.

Yet today, these goals are dismissed by the very people who set them, as mere “fantasy.”

Thus, in his July 14 statement in Vienna to announce the deal, Secretary of State John Kerry dismissed the goals he himself stipulated before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, in December 2013, as “not achievable outside a world of fantasy.”

More ‘…dishonest arguments’ 

Just how gravely the White House has misled the public is starkly reflected in Obama’s July 18 address. He proclaimed: “This week the United States and our international partners finally achieved what decades of animosity has not, a deal that will prevent Iran from attaining a nuclear weapon.”

This is patently untrue. It will not prevent Tehran’s theocratic tyranny from attaining weaponized nuclear capability, even if it deigns to adhere to the unverifiable and unenforceable inspection agreement, which it is ideo-religiously sanctioned – even, mandated – to violate, because it was concluded with “infidels.”

Even by the administration’s own admission it will merely delay Iran. Thus in a April 7 PBS interview, Obama conceded that the deal, even if adhered to, will pave, rather than prevent, Iran’s way to weaponized nuclear capability, baldly admitting that in barely a decade “the breakout times would have shrunk almost down to zero.”

Flying in the face of fact and reason, Obama, with breathtaking disregard for the truth, claimed that a deal, which provided up to $150 billion to the largest state sponsor of terrorism and sets an end to embargoes on conventional arms and ballistic missile technology on it “will make America and the world safer and more secure...”

Yet more dishonesty… 

Disturbingly, it was none other than Obama who in an April 2 White House statement pledged that, notwithstanding impending sanction relief on the nuclear issues, “other American sanctions on Iran [including] for its ballistic missile program will continue to be fully enforced...” But they weren’t.

On this very issue, immediately prior to the announcement of the deal, The New York Times reported that “Obama’s secretary of defense, Ashton B. Carter... told Congress that part of the ban, on technology for ballistic missiles, was critical to America’s own security.” (July 10) Testifying alongside Carter before the Senate Armed Services Committee, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin Dempsey, expressed grave concern over the ballistic missile and conventional arms issue. He was adamant that “Under no circumstances should we relieve pressure on Iran relative to ballistic missile capabilities and arms trafficking...”

Yet to cut a deal with Tehran, Obama backpedaled, and in blatant contradiction to his own pledge, and to the unequivocal positions of the most senior figures in his security establishment, set deadlines for ending the sanctions on both conventional arms and ballistic missiles – all in an endeavor to “make America and the world safer and more secure.”

Sanctions: So much for ‘snap’

In an effort to convince skeptics of the merits of his approach, Obama has frequently contended that “If Iran violates the deal sanctions can be snapped back into place.”

Yet he warned that “Without a deal, the international sanctions regime will unravel, with little ability to reimpose them.”

Hmmm. The ease with which the administration’s claim that sanctions could be “snapped back” is difficult to reconcile with the claim that the very same sanctions could not be maintained if America held out for a more demanding agreement that was in fact consistent with the objectives for which the sanctions were initially imposed – i.e. termination of Iran’s nuclear program and dismantlement of its nuclear facilities.

But be that as it may, as numerous pundits have pointed out, this “snap back” claim is as deceptive as it is detached from the realities on the ground. Last week I cited former secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and George Shultz, who warned of the dangers of being lulled into complacency by “theoretical models of inspection,” which take no account of the daunting difficulties entailed in “[e]nforcing compliance, week after week” over long periods and across vast tracts of territory; and of eliciting international agreement as to the significance of any act deemed to be an alleged violation.

Strongly corroborating the Kissinger-Shultz caveat is an article published days after the announcement of the Vienna deal by Olli Heinonen, senior fellow at Harvard University’s Kennedy School and former deputy director-general for safeguards at IAEA, and Simon Henderson, director of the Gulf and Energy Policy Program at the Washington Institute.

Stridently titled, “There’s a huge problem with Obama’s claims about Iranian nuclear breakout under a final deal,” the article warns, “Even without hidden facilities, establishing most any Iranian violation of the agreement would likely take several months. First, the IAEA and respective agencies in Washington would have to come to that technical judgment; toward that end, inspectors would need timely access anywhere at any time to confirm such findings.

The next step would be to get the political leadership to accept that judgment, then sell the conclusion to the international community.”

So much for “snap.”

Distrust of allies, disdain of adversaries 

Yet another ludicrous claim is made in Obama’s July 15 press conference: “Without [this] deal, we risk even more war in the Middle East, and other countries in the Middle East would feel compelled to develop their own nuclear weapons.”

Nothing could be further from the truth.

For indeed, the deep distrust that this deal has fostered in US allies and the equally deep disdain it has fermented in US adversaries will virtually guarantee a spiraling arms race across the region – both conventional and unconventional.

After all, as manifest US flaccidity erodes the confidence of allies in American resolve to safeguard their security and emboldens adversaries to undertake aggression with relative impunity – or at least, at bearable cost – friend and foe will rush to arm themselves.

As countries such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey and the Gulf states see the US presenting the lenient Vienna deal, with its far-reaching concessions to Iran, as “the best possible alternative,” there will be little to deter them from embarking on the own quest for similar capabilities – and much to induce them to do so, especially in light of their dwindling confidence in the US.

Unless one believes that, on having its uncompromising stance vindicated by the US-led P5+1 abandoning one redline after another, the ayatollahs will suddenly embrace a softer more humane approach, there is only one plausible working assumption to adopt: By generously replenishing the coffers of the current regime, the deal will assure that much of these resources will be channeled to enhance Iran’s military capabilities and those of its violent anti- US proxies across the region, forcing their adversaries to respond in kind.

I can see how readers might have a tough time understanding just how all this will, as Obama claims, “make America and the world safer and more secure.”

The worst whopper: ‘No better alternative’ 

Obama’s alleged ace-in-the-hole is the baseless baloney that opponents of the deal have offered no better alternative. It is a claim that is, at once, infuriating and disingenuous.

It is disingenuous because it was none other than Obama who laid out the alternative to the current deal – which assures Iran’s weaponized nuclear capability, provides funds to propagate terrorism and to destabilize pro-US regimes. Indeed, it was Obama himself who proclaimed that “no deal is better than a bad deal.”

So it is not that there was no alternative – it was merely that Obama was so eager to reach an agreement he was ready to accept almost any deal.

It is not that opponents of the deal did not offer cogent alternatives. It was that the proponents deemed that anything that Iran did not agree to was impractical/unfeasible.

Clearly, if the underlying assumption is that the only practical outcome is a consensual one rather that a coercive one – say of intensified sanctions, backed by a credible threat of military action – then the proponents might be right that there was no available alternative.

But they are cutting the ground from under their own feet. For if the US and its allies cannot confront Tehran with a credible specter of punitive, coercive action, there is no inducement for it to adhere to the deal – making its future abrogation inevitable.

Making regime change more remote

Of course if one wishes to see a durable, non-militarized solution to the Iranian crisis, perhaps the only conceivable avenue is regime change and installation of a more moderate, Western-oriented government.

But by greatly empowering and enriching the incumbent theocracy, the deal cut last week makes such a prospect incalculably more remote.

In the words of Saba Farzan, a German-Iranian journalist and director of a Berlin think tank, published in The Jerusalem Post: “The Vienna deal bears a very grave danger for Iran’s civil society. Not only won’t we see their economic situation improve, but the regime will also have an incentive to abuse human rights more severely. A flood of cash is going into the pockets of this leadership.

It will be used to tighten their grip [on power] and to further imprison, torture and kill innocent Iranians.”

She is, of course, right – and that is one of the greatest tragedies of the travesty concocted in Vienna last week.

Martin Sherman (www.martinsherman.net) is founder and executive director of the Israel Institute for Strategic Studies. (www.strategicisraelorg)

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The mendacity displayed by the Obama administration in defending the Iran Deal rivals that of the rulers of the Soviet Union some 40 year ago. But the Soviet rulers managed to get away with it because the Soviet citizens lived in a society in which they said one thing at home and another in public since telling the truth could result in being put in a psychiatric clinic. In contrast, the Obama administration got away with it only because US citizens are apathetic, disinterested and under informed . How dumb do you actually have to be to believe what Obama and Kerry are telling you? Just read the insane deal.

Colonel Richard Kemp: Unless stopped, Iran will develop a nuclear bomb and Iran will use that nuclear bomb

Allen West speaks at the Stop Iran Rally

Alexander the Great had a fantastic quote, and he said: "I would not fear an army of lions if they were led by a sheep, but I would fear an army of sheep  if they would to be led by a lion."  This great nation is a nation of lions that is currently being led by the greatest of sheep that we have ever seen in our 239 years  of existence.


I want President Barack Obama to know one thing: You may say that you have done something that no one else has ever done. You know why no one else has ever done it? ‘Cause it’s a damn stupid thing that you just did.