The P5+1 Powers Are Pushing for a Newer, Weaker Nuke Deal with Iran

Although the war in the Ukraine monopolizes the world's attention as the cold winter of 2022 drags toward its end  on March 21, what seems to be the quiet push towards a new and worse Nuclear Deal with Iran is now going on as most of the world is distracted by the war.

Me'ir ben Shabbat, former head of Israel's National Security Council, warns that 

"the old-new accord that the USA is now marching towards will pave a sure path for Iran towards a nuclear weapon. after expiration of the limitations [sunset clause]. It has no tools that will force it [Iran] to sit in on discussions for 'a longer and stronger agreement,' And there is no reason to believe that it [Iran] will volunteer to do that on its own initiative. The ayatollahs' regime . . . will maximize what is possible for it to obtain through the agreement and it will do what it is capable of doing -- even against the agreement. [Yisrael HaYom 4 March 2022]

After all, the new accord shaping up has a weak inspection regime which fact seems to be frustrating Raffaele Grossi, head of the IAEA [international atomic energy agency], but he can do nothing without the support of the major powers who make  up the P5+1 group. The major sunset on the limitations supposedly imposed by the accord on Iran will take place in just a few years. If and when the accord is signed, Iran will get lots of dollars and other benefits with which it can finance its terrorist militias in several Middle Eastern countries which regularly cause havoc and suffering in countries where they are hosted, willingly or unwillingly, by the host state. To get some idea of the havoc and suffering consider Lebanon where Hizbullah --an Iranian cats paw-- has a chokehold on the state and most Lebanese are suffering for it.

It is hard not to conclude that the USA and perhaps some of the other powers WANT Iran to have The Bomb.

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ADDED 6-23-2022

https://carolineglick.com/time-to-stop-lying-to-ourselves-about-qatar/

Caroline Glick on Iran's nuke project, Qatar etc

Behind the Fog of War in Ukraine, Biden & Co. Prepare the Way for Iran to Get The Bomb

 David Weinberg agrees that war in the Ukraine is a very important issue. But he sees the upcoming agreement of the P5+1 powers with Iran, a "deal" allowing the ayatollahs to pursue their nuke bomb program, an ever greater danger to world peace and stability.

See below:

SO, YES, UKRAINE is a big story, and Putin is a menace to Western stability. But I will argue here that allowing Iran to march merrily forward with its nuclear bomb and ballistic missile programs and its hegemonic regional ambitions is an even worse threat to world security, and certainly to Israel’s security.

The about-to-be signed nuclear deal with Iran is “shorter and weaker” than president Barack Obama’s bad 2015 deal with the ayatollahs. The old/new deal maintains soon-coming sunset clauses; does not guarantee IAEA supervision of Iranian nuclear installations “anywhere and anytime”; and does not give global powers the actual ability to activate the “snapback mechanism,” which allowed president Donald Trump to reimpose sanctions.

It will whitewash all of Iran’s nuclear program violations to date (like enriching uranium to the 60% level) and allow Iran to keep its advanced centrifuges. It will pave a certain path for Iran to acquire a nuclear bomb in the coming years.

Reportedly, the just-round-the-corner agreement also lacks any mechanisms that will force Iran to engage in additional negotiations over a “longer and stronger” deal before the old/new deal expires – something the Biden administration had promised to Israel and the American public when it set out its goals.

Chillingly, the deal also will grant Iran hundreds of billions of dollars in sanctions relief, allowing Tehran to rehabilitate its economy and continue funding its terrorist proxies and hegemonic aggressions. Instead of reimposing maximum economic pressure and building a credible military threat against Iran, Biden is surrendering to Iran.

See more of this article in the Jerusalem Post of 24 February 2022.

Obama-Biden's Wretched Foreign Policy Legacy -- Does Biden's Supervisory Team Want to Give Us More?

addition 10-10-2010 at bottom

Obama-Biden's worst foreign policy aggression against the world was the so-called Iran Nuke Deal, officially denominated the JCPOA.  In eight years of sanctimonious hypocrisy and bloodthirsty Realpolitik in foreign affairs, the JCPOA was the poisoned cherry at the crown of the cake. We could point to other Obama-Biden offenses: the encouragement of the Muslim Brotherhood [an Islamic supremacy movement notorious for massacres of native Christian Copts in Egypt inter alia], the racist demand on Israel to stop letting Jews make their homes in Judea-Samaria beyond the Green Line [parts of the Jewish National Home erected under international law by the San Remo Conference and the League of Nations], encouraging the aggressive Turkish Islamist dictator, Recep Tayip Erdogan [who tirelessly threatens war and incites war against Israel and other eastern Mediterranean and Caucasian neighbors, etc], and so forth and so on. But all in all, the Iran Nuke Deal that allowed Iran to keep working towards a bomb because the JCPOA lacked an effective  inspection regime, plus it had a "sunset" clause that would let Iran openly continue to work for a bomb or increase its numbers of nuke bombs after eight years, plus a gift for Iran's insincere agreement to the Deal of a mere $150 billion [including a billion or so in cash, allowing Iran to surreptitiously fund its terrorist cats paws in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria and Yemen], seems the most dangerous for the world. 

Biden took willing, perhaps eager, part in these destructive, warmongering policies. It was Biden who came to Jerusalem to promote the policy of apartheid against Jews in Judea-Samaria ["West Bank"], while Zbigniew Brzezinski --Jimmy Carter's national insecurity advisor-- traveled to Damascus during the 2008 presidential election campaign to let the bloody Bashar Assad know that if Obama were elected, he would have a friend in the White House. So Biden too was morally responsible for the Obama-Biden administration's foreign policy aggressions, while Biden's foreign policy [or "national security" staff] openly boast of going back to the JCPOA from which President Trump had withdrawn. Despite their planned Afghanistan fiasco in August 2021, the Biden foreign policy team still want to make it easier for Iran to achieve its longed for Bomb. They and their supporters claim that somehow a new agreement with Iran to stop working for a nuke Bomb will stop Iran from getting that nuclear bomb. But treaties do not enforce themselves and Iran has already violated the JCPOA in letter and spirit. 

We also know that in the 1990s, the USA under Bill Clinton negotiated a nuclear bomb freeze with North Korea. The Communist dictatorhip of North Korea was supposed to not make a nuclear bomb, according to that agreement with Clinton's administration. But guess what!! North Korea now has a nuclear bomb. The agreement with Clinton and his team did not in fact prevent North Korea from getting the Bomb. Even worse for the JCPOA, some of Clinton's team when he made the acccord with North Korea are now back and working on nuke negotiations with Iran [such as Wendy Sherman] as part of Biden's team. Only a fool could believe that either a new and improved JCPOA or a wholly new agreement wth Iran would actually prevent the fanatics in Teheran from getting The Bomb.

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Addition 10-10-2021 --- Michael Singh, Wall Street Journal (30 December 2015). A summary of Obama administration failures abroad in 2015

The Obama administration frequently cites the Iran nuclear deal as a marquee accomplishment. Achieving U.S. objectives through diplomacy would have been laudable, but the nuclear deal was possible precisely because the U.S. laid aside its objectives. Iran made concessions but also largely achieved its strategic aims: retaining its nuclear weapons capability and resisting demands for a broader “strategic shift” in its support for terrorism and regional policies. Iran also received sanctions relief that is broader in practice than on paper, all in exchange for temporary limits on its nuclear fuel-cycle activities.

Secretary of State John Kerry has said that “diplomacy is the art of the possible.” Yet administration officials fail to comprehend how U.S. action, or inaction, can shape what is possible. This was clear in Afghanistan, where President Barack Obama was forced to face the consequences of prematurely announcing a U.S. withdrawal. It is increasingly clear in Syria, where the White House, despite foreseeing the dangers posed by the conflict, is shifting objectives in response to others’ actmangingions rather than taking the initiative.                                      Michael Singh was at that time the managing director if the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. From 2005 to 2008, he worked on Middle East issues at the National Security Council.

The Pollyanna "Liberals" Were Wrong about Iran & Khomeini; Now Wrong about PLO/PA and the Muslim Brotherhood

A lot of the so-called "liberals" & "progressives" in the United States have long championed the causes of tyrants abroad, whether Stalin or Castro or --more recently-- the Muslim Brotherhood and so on and so forth. This has often been done by presenting the tyrants or would be tyrants as representing the democratic will of the people or as being liberal, progressive and tolerant themselves. A classic case of how this was done appeared not long after Khomeini's regime took power in Iran. The new regime was extolled for its civil libertarian commitment.

We now know that Khomeini and his successors were and are anything but devoted to liberal values, to civil liberties, democracy, etc. However, Kai Bird, a very prominent "leftist" and "progressive" in the 1960s and 1970s fought valiantly to present this false image of Khomeini & Co. to the American public. When you read Mr Bird, think of the academic and media advocates of the Iran regime or the Muslim Brotherhood or Hamas or Fatah/PLO, and so on, today.

Bird wrote the following in an article that was featured on the front page of the "Liberal" weekly The Nation magazine [31 March 1979]:

. . .  there is every reason to believe that the still unpublished Constitution [of the brand new Iranian Islamic Republic] will include all the elements of a liberal democratic system. Minister of Information Nasser Menachi,  a close confidant of Bazargan and a man with impeccable civil libertarian credentials, told The Nation that "the new Constitution --which has been drafted by five foreign-trained jurists-- contains the strongest possible civil libertarian guarantees. . . . and Khomeini himself  has approved the document with but the most minor changes, a fact which should be read as an extremely good sign." The Ayatollah will reportedly have no formal office in the proposed Islamic Republic. Elections are scheduled to be held within several months after the adoption of the Constitution.
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Isn't this all just too noble, too precious, too lofty to be believable? It hardly corresponds to how the Ayatollah Khomeini and his successors have actually ruled Iran.

Does everyone see the pattern in this excerpt here? Consider the style here against the background of the tens of thousands --or hundreds of thousands or millions-- of victims of the Iranian regime over the years? Look at the grand phrases in this not very long paragraph: liberal democratic system & impeccable civil libertarian credentials & the strongest possible civil libertarian guarantees. 

How many readers of Emet m'Tsiyon would want to depend upon the civil libertarian guarantees of the Iranian regime? Now just how is it that Kai Bird and his editors at The Nation could not foresee what the Khomeini regime would produce, a regime that tramples civil liberties and pays lip service to them at best? A regime that is a caricature of democracy where the leading ayatollah, called the Supreme Guide, has the final say on everything, whatever the parliament may think?

Why couldn't Bird and his The Nation friends understand that the books that Khomeini had written, books in which he expressed a desire for a political regime based on Islam, Shiite Islam, explained what he would do if and when he took power? That that was the kind of regime he would erect and that civil liberties would bow before the needs of the regime of ayatollahs implementing Islam as they saw it and interpreted it? Did they ask what would happen to ethnic and religious minorities in Iran, such as Jews, Bahais, or Sunni Muslims, for that matter? Did Bird & Co. ask how women would fare under the ayatollahs who would apply strict Shiite Muslim rules to them? Did they ask whether Khomeini's ostensible loyalty to or tolerance for democracy and civil liberties, and the comforting, liberal-sounding slogans that he and his associates threw out from time to time might not have been mere dissembling for the purpose of gaining and consolidating power?

Were Bird and his friends naive, ignorant, simpleminded or simply deceitful? We may ask the same question today about Washington policy specialists and American academics who promote the cause of the Muslim Brotherhood or Hizbullah or Hamas or Fatah or the so-called "palestine liberation organization."
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Now that we know what "liberal" establishment journalism and its predictions are worth in the United States -- and elsewhere, let's talk a little about Kai Bird. He was known as being hostile to Israel back in the 1960s, when that was less fashionable than today. He had been in Israel during his rather privileged childhood when his father, an American diplomat, and his family lived in the Jordanian-occupied sector of Jerusalem from which all Jews were driven out, starting in December 1947. Young Master Bird crossed the Armistice Line, the Green Line, every day that he went to school. This was the Anglican school on Street of the Prophets [רחוב הנביאים] in "west Jerusalem" under Israeli control. The school is still there although in the past 20 or 25 years it has raised its stone outer wall by three or four feet. Little Master Bird crossed on every school day the Mandelbaum Gate, actually a border crossing built partly over the home of a family named Mandelboym [the proper Yiddish pronunciation]. The house had been destroyed in the fighting in 1948. The colony of Westerners living in Jordanian-occupied Jerusalem was notorious in those days for being fanatically anti-Israel and anti-Jewish. Bird and his family lived in the Sheikh Jarrah quarter near the Orient House, the American Colony Hotel, and the old Jewish neighborhoods of Shimon haTsadiq, Nahalat Shimon, and Siebenbergen Houses from which the Jewish residents had been driven out in December 1947 and January 1948.

From the Mandelboym Gate crossing Bird and his schoolmates from the Jordanian sector traveled down Tribes of Israel Street [Shivtey Yisra'el שבטי ישראל], formerly St George Street under the British, which name Jordan kept for the street on its side of the armistice line. The pupils traveled for about one-half kilometer down to Street of the Prophets, turning right into and traveling on it for about a kilometer or more. They were escorted, to my knowledge, by armed Israeli troops. But they were also protected by the power and prestige of the empires and governments that they and their families represented.

As to Kai Bird's honesty, I have read several reviews of his autobiography for this blog post, and I don't find any reference to his  activity with the American "New Left" in the 1960s, 1970s and afterwards. I have to conclude that he left that information out of his book. He apparently decided that references to his "New Left" activism would not be useful or beneficial to him or his political purposes.

Obama Pressured Europeans to Give in to Iran on the Nuclear Deal

Shocking news from the Wall Street Journal. It has long been known that France was much more concerned over an Iranian nuke than Washington was. Nicolas Sarkozy when he was president even made a speech about Iran as a problem at the UN General Assembly [see here about Iranian insults & threats to Sarkozy's wife]. Now we find out this:

One of the toughest of the country’s hard-nosed security experts, Bruno Tertrais, wrote last month in the Canadian newspaper Le Devoir that “with pressure from the Obama administration” European negotiators’ original intent deteriorated from a rollback of Iran’s nuclear ambitions to their containment. [John Vinocur in the Wall Street Journal, 24 August 2015]

So Obama's administration pressured the  supposed "Western allies" of the USA to go easy on Iran and give in to Iranian demands rather than forcing Iran to give in to Western demands, through sanctions for instance. Moreover, Obama's Iran nuke deal is:

. . . . what France knows is a lousy Iran nuclear deal. [same article, John Vinocur in the Wall Street Journal, 24 August 2015]

A French negotiator at the P5 + 1 talks with Iran was one Jacques Audibert. He met two American congressmen visiting France and told them that if Congress voted down the deal it would most likely NOT mean war. Rather, congressional disapproval of the deal would likely lead to renewed negotiations and a better deal. Here is the story from Bloomberg:

Top French Official Contradicts Kerry on Iran Deal

532 JUL 31, 2015 3:04 PM EDT

By Josh Rogin

Secretary of State John Kerry has been painting an apocalyptic picture of what would happen if Congress killed the Iran nuclear deal. Among other things, he has warned that “our friends in this effort will desert us." But the top national security official from one of those nations involved in the negotiations, France, has a totally different view: He told two senior U.S. lawmakers that he thinks a Congressional no vote might actually be helpful.

His analysis is already having an effect on how members of Congress, especially House Democrats, are thinking about the deal.

The French official, Jacques Audibert, is now the senior diplomatic adviser to President Francois Hollande. Before that, as the director general for political affairs in the Foreign Ministry from 2009 to 2014, he led the French diplomatic team in the discussions with Iran and the P5+1 group. Earlier this month, he met with Democrat Loretta Sanchez and Republican Mike Turner, both top members of the House Armed Services Committee, to discuss the Iran deal. The U.S. ambassador to France, Jane Hartley, was also in the room.

According to both lawmakers, Audibert expressed support for the deal overall, but also directly disputed Kerry’s claim that a Congressional rejection of the Iran deal would result in the worst of all worlds, the collapse of sanctions and Iran racing to the bomb without restrictions.

“He basically said, if Congress votes this down, there will be some saber-rattling and some chaos for a year or two, but in the end nothing will change and Iran will come back to the table to negotiate again and that would be to our advantage,” Sanchez told me in an interview. “He thought if the Congress voted it down, that we could get a better deal.”

. . . . . . . .

Audibert's comments as recounted by the lawmakers are a direct rebuttal to Kerry, who in remarks to the Council on Foreign Relations on July 24 said that if Congress voted down the deal, there would no chance to restart negotiations in search of a tougher pact. Kerry also said that Congressional rejection of the Iran deal would erode the U.S. credibility to strike any type of international agreement in the future. “Do you think the Ayatollah is going to come back to the table if Congress refuses this and negotiate again? Do you think that they're going to sit there and other people in the world are going to say, hey, let's go negotiate with the United States, they have 535 secretaries of State?” Kerry said. “I mean, please.”

This argument is being echoed by a throng of U.S. commentators and former Obama administration officials who support the deal. . . . . .

Audibert also wasn’t happy with some of the terms of the deal itself, according to Sanchez and Turner. He said he thought it should have been negotiated to last forever, not start to expire in as few as 10 years. He also said he didn’t understand why Iran needed more than 5,000 centrifuges for a peaceful nuclear program. He also expressed concerns about the robustness of the inspections and verification regime under the deal, according to the lawmakers. . . . .

When the lawmakers returned to Washington, news of their conversation with Audibert spread among their colleagues. Turner confronted Kerry with Audibert’s statements during a July 22 closed-door briefing with Kerry and more than 300 House lawmakers. The briefing was classified, but Turner’s questions to Kerry were not.

“Are you surprised Jacques Audibert believes we could have gotten a better deal?” Turner asked Kerry, according to Turner.

“The secretary appeared surprised and had no good answer as to why the national security adviser of France had a completely different position than what the secretary told us the same day,” Turner told me.

Sanchez was not at that briefing, but since then, many lawmakers have asked her about the information, especially Democrats, she told me. “It’s one piece of information that people will use to decide where they are,” she explained. [Josh Rogin, Bloomberg,  31 July 2015]

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France's position before capitulating to Obama administration pressure [here]

Saudi Arabia's stance against an Iranian nuke was clear but disregarded by Obama, as was Israel opposition [go to link and go down toward the bottom].

Italian Middle East expert, Carlo Panella, foresaw in 2009 that Obama and his crowd would capitulate to Iran on the nuclear issue [here]

John Kerry Lies to the Media and Public about the Surrender to the Ayatollahs' Destructive Nuclear Urges

We know that Obama is an artist of smooth, well-spoken lies. I cannot think of anybody who lies so well with a straight face. But secretary of state John Kerry lies too, albeit not as smoothly as his boss.

The fact is that Iran is in violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty [NPT] signed years ago. Rather than negotiating with Iran, the USA and other states in the P5+1 group should have been working to force Iran to comply with its obligations under the NPT. But as we know Obama and other politicians wanted to negotiate with Iran over its nuke bomb endeavors. In this case, negotiating means compromising on the original provisions of the NPT.  The nuke deal with Iran from last week also excuses Iran from compliance with previous UN Security Council resolutions, as we see below.

Omri Ceren, one of the good guys in the fight against the Iranian nuke project, took up Kerry's brazen lies on the US Sunday news interview shows. Omri sent this around as a fact sheet for the Israel Project where he works. The problems are not only Iran's nuke project. Consider item 2) below and bear in mind that Iran has been developing long-range ballistic missiles [ICBMs intercontinental ballistic missiles] the better to deliver any future bomb and not just on Israel:

The administration is scrambling to justify collapsing on conditions related to the three overarching areas of the JCPOA [= Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action] debate:
1) will it work to keep Iran away from a nuclear weapon for a decade (the verification debate); 
2) even if it works, is it worth the cost of empowering Iran with advanced weapons and hundreds of billions of dollars (the arms embargo debate);
3) doesn't the deal make Iran into a nuclear power – the opposite of what it was supposed to do – because it expires and allows Iran's breakout time to go to zero (the sunset clause debate).
. . . . .
By far the most unexpected concession made at Vienna involved the Americans bowing to new Iranian-Russian demands to eliminate the United Nation arms embargo. Restrictions on conventional weapons will now expire in 5 years and ones on ballistic missiles will expire in 8 years. The collapse - which has been wrapped into how Iran is also receiving a short-term $150 billion windfall and long-term sanctions relief - was discussed on every one of the Sunday shows [a][b][c][d][e].

Kerry and Moniz had three different responses sprinkled across the shows: (1) that the administration had no choice but to concede on the arms embargo, and it was actually an American diplomatic victory because it's being phased out rather than lifted immediately (2) that dropping the arms embargo doesn't matter - "a mountain is being made out of a mole hill" - because there are other restrictions on Iranian arms transfers (3) that Iran won't get sufficient relief to exploit the arms embargo being lifted.

(1) The administration had no choice but to concede on the arms embargo, and it was actually an American diplomatic victory because it's being phased out rather than lifted immediately -

ABC This Week
KERRY: The United Nations resolution which brought about the sanctions in the first place said that if Iran will suspend its enrichment and come to negotiations, all the sanctions would be lifted. Now, they've done more than just come to negotiations. They've actually negotiated a deal. And three of the seven nations thought they shouldn't therefore be held to any kind of restraint. We prevailed and insisted, no, they have to be.
CBS Face the Nation
KERRY: ... [T]he reason that we were only able to limit them to the five and eight, which is quite extraordinary that we got that, was that three of the nations negotiating thought they shouldn't have any and were ready to hold out to do that. And we said under no circumstances, we have to have those...
Fox News Sunday
KERRY: This is a nuclear negotiation about a nuclear program. The United Nations, when they passed the resolution, contemplated that if Iran came to the negotiation and they ponied up, all the sanctions would be lifted. We didn't lift all the sanctions. We left in place despite the fact that three out of seven countries negotiating wanted to do away with them altogether. We won the five years for the arms and eight years for the missiles.
CNN State of the Union
KERRY: ... [T]his UN process that started the – that allowed the sanctions to be put in place in the first place contemplated the lifting of all sanctions once Iran had lived up to its obligations with respect to the NPT. So if the IAEA found in X number of years that they've lived up to this, then all the sanctions would be gone. So we, in fact, succeeded against three countries that didn't think they should have to do anything.
NBC Meet The Press
KERRY: And by the way, even though the arms and the missiles were put to – by the – they were thrown in as an add-on to this nuclear agreement. It was always contemplated that if Iran did come and deal on their nuclear program, that was going to be lifted.

This claim is false on at least a couple of levels. First, the condition for lifting the arms embargo was not that Iran "come to negotiations." UNSCR 1929 stipulated that the embargo was to remain in place until Iran had complied with UNSCR 1929 plus past UNSCRs 1696, 1737, 1747, and 1803 ([f] - ctrl-f down to "to persuade Iran to comply with resolutions"). The UNSCRs obligated Iran to stop all uranium enrichment, cease all heavy water plutonium work, and halt all development of proliferation sensitive ballistic missiles. So the arms embargo was to remain in place until Iran dismantled its nuclear program, not until it agreed to negotiate.

Second, there was nothing forcing U.S. to agree to lift the embargo. The JCPOA allows Iran to continue doing all of the activities prohibited by previous UNSCRs. The Americans could and should have argued that Iran was already receiving a Get Out Of Jail Free Card on its UNSCR obligations via sanctions relief, and that there was no reason to also gift them with the removal of the arms embargo.

(2) Dropping the arms embargo doesn't matter - "a mountain is being made out of a mole hill" - because there are other restrictions on Iranian arms transfers -

ABC This Week
KERRY: But we have ample other resolutions that allow us to hold them accountable for moving any weapons. President Obama is committed to doubling down on the enforcement of those measures. So I really think that a mountain is being made out of a molehill here.
CBS Face the Nation
KERRY: ... [T]hey add on to additional mechanisms that we have to hold them accountable on arms and missiles. We have the missile control technology regime. We have other missile restraints on them. We also have other UN resolutions that prevent them from moving arms to the Houthi, prevents them from moving arms to the Shia, prevents them from – to the Shia militia in Iraq, prevents them from moving arms to Hizballah.
CNN State of the Union
QUESTION: ... Why is lifting the embargo part of this deal?
KERRY: Well, we're not lifting it. It has eight years out of a 10-year component of the UN resolution. Eight years it will be applied, and we have other UN resolutions and other mechanisms for holding Iran accountable on missiles.
Fox News Sunday
KERRY: But we have many other sanctions still applicable, and we can bring other sanctions to push back against any of their behavior. They're not allowed to send arms to Hizballah. That's a separate resolution. They're not allowed to send arms to the Shia militia in Iraq. A separate resolution. They're not allowed to send arms to the Houthis. Separate resolution. So we, in fact, have a huge ability to be able to bring any number of efforts against Iran for any bad behavior here whatsoever.

This claim is misleading because the JCPOA will make it functionally impossible to reimpose economic pressure on Iran, regardless of what laws remain on the books [g]. 

Paragraph 25: "If a law at the state or local level in the United States is preventing the implementation of the sanctions lifting as specified in this JCPOA, the United States will take appropriate steps... with a view to achieving such implementation." 

Paragraph 26: "The EU will refrain from re-introducing or re-imposing the sanctions that it has terminated implementing under this JCPOA... The United States will make best efforts in good faith to sustain this JCPOA and to prevent interference with the realisation of the full benefit by Iran of the sanctions lifting specified in Annex II." 

Paragraph 29: "The EU and its Member States and the United States, consistent with their respective laws, will refrain from any policy specifically intended to directly and adversely affect the normalisation of trade and economic relations with Iran inconsistent with their commitments not to undermine the successful implementation of this JCPOA."

The punchline is the very last line of the very last paragraph of the main agreement, which gives Iran its own snapback mechanism against the United States by allowing it to return to enrichment if sanctions are even partially reinstated. 

Paragraph 37: "Iran has stated that if sanctions are reinstated in whole or in part, Iran will treat that as grounds to cease performing its commitments under this JCPOA in whole or in part." Maybe the administration will say that the passage was only intended to refer to nuclear sanctions. That's not how it's written, and the Iranians have a 100% success rate of winning interpretation debates vs. the Americans over vague language in agreements and factsheets.

(3) Iran won't get sufficient relief to exploit the arms embargo being lifted

Fox News SundayQUESTION: Under this deal, we lift the arms embargo on Iran being able to buy weapons and even ballistic missiles between five and eight years. And the sanctions against General Soleimani, head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard's Qods Force, are also lifted. What we end up with, Secretary Kerry, is an Iran with billions, hundreds of billions of dollars more, able to buy weapons, and a Revolutionary Guard with fewer restraints. Isn't that potentially an even more dangerous state sponsor of terror in the Middle East?
KERRY: First of all, Chris, don't exaggerate. It's not hundreds of billions of dollars. It's $100 billion.
QUESTION: That's in the first year.
KERRY: But – it's their money that they have had frozen.
QUESTION: I understand. But it's a hundred --
KERRY: Well, let me – but let me just finish.
QUESTION: A hundred fifty billion is the first year.
KERRY: Please. Chris, this is not supposed to be a debate. You're supposed to ask a question and we're supposed to be able to answer it.

This is a strange stance to take. The $100 - $150 billion windfall will occur within months of the deal being implemented, but while that happens the sanctions regime will be shredded, allowing the Iranian economy to skyrocket to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars. The lifting of economic sanctions will trigger a gold rush into Iran [h]. The administration used to claim that worries over Iranian noncompliance would dampen enthusiasm - because no company wants to enter the market if they have to leave a year later - but the final JCPOA has a loophole so snapback doesn't apply to companies that set up shop in Iran before noncompliance [i]. Snapback is a fiction anyway [j]. Meanwhile the delisting of banks will remove the last economic lever that the West has over Iran, and those financial sanctions are never coming back [k].

- - - - - - - - - - - - - END of Omri Ceren's Factsheet for The Israel Project - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 

Once upon a time, the so-called "Left" opposed nuclear proliferation. Cathy Ashton, the mentally challenged former commissioner of foreign affairs for the EU commission, had even been a hired employee of the British supposed anti-nuke outfit, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Then when she started work with the EU and negotiated with Iranian representatives she became in fact an agent of nuclear proliferation and was effectively scoffing at the principle of nuclear disarmament. Obama is identified with the "Left" but we don't know anymore what those terms, left and right, mean. In the 1950s, officials of the Republican Eisenhower administration were quite complacent about nuclear weapons and "peaceful uses of atomic energy." Nowadays, the so-called "Left", led by Obama is actively facilitating nuclear proliferation to Iran and indirectly provoking Sunni Arab states like Saudi Arabia and Egypt to set up or restart their own nuclear programs [as in Egypt's case] as a defensive measure against Iran. Hence, Obama is instrumental in bringing  about a dread nuclear arms race. And Obama and his minions have the hhutspah to insinuate that opponents of the nuke deal with Iran are warmongers. 

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Former Saudi ambassador to US chides Obama for making the nuke deal with Iran which he indicates is worse than Clinton's nuke deal with North Korea. [here & here]

For those who are not aware, Saudi Arabia has been consulting with Israel for some time now in trying to work together to counter Obama's pro-Iran nuke deal, despite all of the other issues that divide the two countries.

Obama & Kerry to Iran: If you like your nuke you can keep your nuke!!

If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor, period.
Barack Hussein Obama, President of the United States, 
to the AMA 15 June 2009 

Prez Obama lied to his own people when he wanted to push through his so-called Obamacare medical plan, in order to quiet down opposition and prevent his electoral base from verging into opposition to that plan. In fact, his plan has led to a severe reduction in medical care for many Americans, including those retired people living on Social Security and used to receiving medical care under the previous Medicare plan. And under Obamacare, many Americans cannot keep their doctor. Obama is lying again today. If Obama is capable of lying to his own people so as to negatively affect their medical care, and thus their health, why would he not lie to nations outside the USA?

He sent secretary of state Kerry to lie for him to the Arab states opposed to and threatened by a nuclear Iran, as well as to Israel which shares common ground with Arab states, at least on this one issue on which both Israel and most Arab states share fears of an Iranian Bomb. Last night [Saturday night]  I heard Kerry say on Israel TV channel 10:

"We will have inspectors in there every single day. That's not a 10-year deal. That's forever. There have to be inspections," he said. [Also see Jerusalem Post, 2 May 2015, Internet ed.]

Every day? Have the Iranians agreed to that? In fact, Iran has been legally bound for several decades to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty which already obliged Iran to undergo inspections of nuclear sites or suspected nuclear sites. But Iran has long resisted compliance with the treaty and prevented inspectors from the IAEA [international atomic energy agency] from inspecting in Iran as they had the legal right to do by virtue of the treaty. Which Iran has been violating for years by that fact alone, among others. Nonetheless, major Western powers, the UK, France, Germany and the USA have given Iran several "last chances." The first "last chance" was in 2003. Hence, you have to ask whether these powers really wanted to stop Iran from obtaining The Bomb --- or did they quietly want Iran to have The Bomb?

Anyhow, with Obama & Kerry and their team of lethal clowns in power, things are getting worse from the nuclear non-proliferation standpoint. Now, in order to calm down Arab opposition to the Iran nuke deal, the White House is said to be offering them high tech weapons never offered to them before (which they are however well able to pay for). But the USA is already committed to maintaining an Israeli upper hand over the Arabs in armaments, in view of the fact that the  Arabs were long threatening Israel but Israel was not threatening them. Since Obama has no compunctions about violating the international obligations of the United States, including treaties, it might sell these Arab states the very most advanced weapons. This will create a very dangerous situation in the Middle East which will be worse than the present dangerous situation. Some Arab states may work to develop their own nuke weapons to reinforce themselves, supposedly, against Iranian aggression. 

So Obama's "peace efforts" are looking more and more like war efforts. Nevertheless, Kerry claimed that:
"I say it again. We will not sign a deal that does not close off Iran's pathways to a bomb and that doesn't give us the confidence to all of our experts and global experts, that we will be able to know what Iran is doing and prevent them from getting a nuclear weapon."

A sure way to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon would be to make sure that Iran divests itself of its nuke bomb making capacity. The Lausanne framework as proclaimed by Obama and by Iranian officials [who did not agree on the content of the framework] is meant to contain Iran's capacity to produce a nuke bomb, not to eliminate that capacity. Hence, according to what Obama and his minions are admitting to now, the agreement which is not yet an agreement will allow Iran to keep its nuke bombmaking capacity. Hence there is always the danger that it will make a bomb, The Bomb, once it has decided to do so. And in a short time. Furthermore, Kerry's claim about "inspectors in there [watching Iran's nuke project] every single day" sounds groundless, given the fact that Iran has been preventing IAEA inspectors from viewing its nuke project for years, and when not preventing access for the inspectors, it has been making things difficult for them. 

So other regional governments, Arabs, Israel, and others, believe that Iran will have The Bomb sooner or later and most likely sooner. Therefore, 

"Leading Persian Gulf states want major new weapons systems and security guarantees from the White House in exchange for backing a nuclear agreement with Iran, according to U.S. and Arab officials." . . . [Wall Street Journal, JAY SOLOMON And  CAROL E. LEE, May 2, 2015]

". . . The demands underscore what complicated diplomatic terrain Mr. Obama is navigating as he drives toward one of his top foreign-policy goals, and they demonstrate how a nuclear deal with Iran aimed at stabilizing the Middle East risks further militarizing an already volatile region." [Ibid, WSJ, 2 May 2015]

Although these Arab countries are mainly interested in having the most advanced weapons to counter the Iranian threat, which will grow if Iran has The Bomb,  their having these weapons will also threaten Israel. 

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu shares the Arab governments’ belief that Iran poses the greatest security challenge to their region. But there remains fear in Israel that over the long term any sophisticated systems sold to the GCC countries could eventually be turned on Israel, according to Israeli officials. [Ibid.]

Another danger is that the failure to enforce existing and longstanding treaties, like the NPT [nuclear non-proliferation treaty] or the laws of the sea treaties or the treaty guaranteeing US defense of the Marshall Islands, relevant in regard to the ship seized by Iran last week that was flying the Marshall Islands flag, is dangerous.

Assuming America does not act to enforce international conventions, however, Iran will have proved her point that the conventions are no longer enforced. [Cmdr J E Dyer, USN ret here]

This means that the USA under Obama is helping make treaties ridiculous, and thereby increasing the risk to peace in other ways than simply letting Iran build The Bomb.

Once again, Obama and Kerry's "peace efforts" turn out to be war efforts.
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Sarah Honig supplies additional reasons not to trust Obama's administration [here].
Karen Elliott House explains and describes Saudi Arabia's new diplomacy [here] on 1 May 2015 in Wall Street Journal. See this paragraph: 
". . .  in two weeks . . . Mr. Obama hosts a summit of the Gulf Cooperation Council, or GCC, a collection of small Gulf countries plus Saudi Arabia, that Riyadh is seeking to lead in combating Iran’s Middle East expansion. The Saudis still hope to persuade Washington to be more active in the fight not just against Islamic State forces but also against Bashar Assad in Syria.
Mr. Obama seems to see the summit as simply an opportunity to encourage these nations to fend for themselves, showing U.S. concern for their security without offering concrete action. As Saudis point out, there is a chasm between Mr. Obama’s words and actions—as seen in his unilateral erasing of the “red line” he declared regarding Mr. Assad’s use of chemical weapons in Syria."

Obama Is Negotiating with Hitler's Iranian Spiritual Heirs

Other than developing a nuclear bomb in violation of Iran's commitment to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the NPT, what else is Iran doing in violation of international law and of all decency? Our last post showed threats made by the present ayatollah government of Iran against the Jews of Israel. These threats violate UN Charter, Article 2:4. Some of these show an uncanny resemblance to Hitler's threats to annihilate the Jews, as shown in the previous post. So on those grounds alone there seems to be something wrong in negotiating with Iran as if somehow an agreement with the present ayatollahs' regime could bring about a peaceful resolution of Iran's quest for The Bomb in violation of the NPT. Part of the problem with Obama's negotiating stance --and that of the P5+1 powers as a whole-- is that they seldom if ever speak of the treaty violation embodied in the very quest by the ayatollahs' regime for a nuclear weapon.

Nevertheless, it would be helpful to display the threats that the present Iranian regime has made in order to properly appreciate the nature of the regime and its purposes. The threats were not only against Israel:

"Israel will disappear and the Western countries that defend it would do well to abandon it so that they themselves are not overwhelmed by the rage of hundreds of millions of Muslims. If the rage of the peoples of the region becomes a storm, it will not be contained within the boundaries of Lebanon and Palestine but will crash down on you too. Think of your own long term interests in the region. This is our final word."
[Muhammad Ahmadinejad 20 October 2006, quoted by Carlo Panella in Fascismo Islamico (Milan: Rizzoli 2007), pp 23-24. Also in Le Monde, 22-23 Octobre 2006; p4]

For those who want to check, here is the quote above as translated into Italian by Carlo Panella:

"Israele scomparirà e i Paesi occidentali che lo difendono faranno bene ad abbandonarlo per non essere essi stessi travolti dalla rabbia di centinaia di milioni di musulmani. Se la rabbia dei popoli della regione diventa una tempesta, non sarà contenuta nei confine del Libano e della Palestina, ma si abbaterà anche su di voi. Pensate ai vostri interessi a lungo termine nella regione. Questa è la nostra ultima parola." [Mohammed Ahmadinejad, 20 ottobre 2006, citato da Carlo Panella in Fascismo Islamico (Milan: Rizzoli 2007), pp 23-24]

Let's examine what Ahmadinejad said above. He made these threats against the Western countries, although the United States had helped the Khomeini regime take power in 1979 when Ahmadinejad was just a junior regime thug leader. France too had helped Khomeini by letting him take refuge in France before he came back to Iran. The US role was described by George Lenczowski in a piece in American Spectator circa 1981. A-jad threatens a storm against the Western countries, although some had helped the regime take power in Iran. He threatens Western interests in the Middle East, but he suggests that these interests will be protected if only the Western states collaborate in destroying Israel. This is explicit in another part of A-jad's statement of the same date. Addressing the UK and the USA, he says: "You . . .  brought into the Middle East this Israeli people of terrorists and enemies of religion [ie, of Islam]. You helped it to subdue the peoples of the region. The best thing now is for you yourselves to take it away." [Panella, op cit, p24]. The remark: "This is our final word," has a strong odor of Hitler's bombastic threats and ultimatums.

Unfortunately, some of Ahmadinejad's demagoguic lies are widely believed nowadays, so much so as to be what Max Nordau called "conventional lies of civilization." For the record, Jews have always lived in the Middle Easten region and in the Land of Israel in particular since the beginnings of the Jewish/Israelite people thousands of years ago. About half of Israel's Jewish population migrated from Muslim-ruled lands, including Iran where Jews were oppressed. So much for the UK and USA bringing Jews into the Middle East. Next, since Israel became independent in 1948 --which was opposed by the UK & USA-- they have usually favored and encouraged the Arab states and PLO against Israel. As of now, the USA and the EU to which the UK belongs contribute something like a billion dollars per year to the budget of the Palestinian Authority. One may add the millions donated by the EU and its member states to so-called non-governmental organizations besmirching Israel and undermining it in public opinion.

Finally, A-jad threatened Europe in particular. "The Americans are far away but you are the neighbors of the peoples of this region. . .  [If you support Israel, you must expect] the hatred of the peoples of the world. . . if the hurricane is unleashed, its effects will not be limited to the borders of Palestine and they will strike you."
[quoted in Panella, op cit, pp 24-25; also Le Monde, 22-23 Octobre 2006; p4]

This is the nature of the regime that Obama claims will restrain itself and keep an agreement if he conducts proper negotiations with it. Can Obama not know the thuggish, fascistic nature of the regime in Teheran?

Negotiating with Iran, the Powers Avoid Crimes against the Jews

The Major Western Powers --the US, UK, France, & Germany -- have been negotiating with Iran over its nuclear bomb project for many years. As far back as 2003, these powers, all sitting on the board of governors of the International Atomic Energy Agency, got a motion passed at that body to give Iran "one last chance" to prove that it was not in violation [non-compliance] with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the NPT. Of course Iran was in violation and of course everybody knew it. But such are the strange ways of diplomacy that mild sanctions were not applied against Iran for non-compliance until 2007 while "biting sanctions" took effect only in January 2012. All the while Iran was developing the capacity to produce a nuclear bomb.

Meanwhile, in 2006 these four Western powers were joined by Russia and China in a group called P5 +1, referring to the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany. The biting or punitive sanctions imposed as of January 2012 were having a severe effect on the Iranian economy. However, in late 2013 Obama and Kerry decided to ease the sanctions and negotiate with the ayatollahs. All this instead of enforcing the terms of the NPT. In fact, the NPT is hardly ever mentioned, which likely leaves many people wondering what is the legal ground for preventing Iran from developing The Bomb.

Nevertheless, my object in this post is a violation of international law by Iran that the P5 + 1 powers seem to be totally disinterested in. I refer to the threats against Israel coming out of Teheran. Such threats are forbidden by the UN charter, Article 2, clause 4:
"All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations."

Hatred for Jews and Israel goes back to the early days of the Khomeini takeover of Iran, facilitated at the time by the policy of Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security advisor for President Carter.

However, the first threat that I have dug up goes back to 20 October 2006 when Ahmadinajad stated:
"Israel will disappear . . . [because of] the rage of hundreds of millions of Muslims"
[quoted by Carlo Panella in Fascismo Islamico (Milan: Rizzoli 2007), pp 23-24]

Since then assorted Iranian leaders and officials have threatened Israel again and again:

11/09/2014: Ayatollah Khamenei’s Twitter: “This barbaric, wolflike & infanticidal regime of #Israel which spares no crime has no cure but to be annihilated." [here]

July 28, 2014: On #Eid al-Fitr we pray that #God repels& fends off the evil existence of oppressive & bloodthirsty Zionists from #Palestine& region.8/31/11 #GazaUnderAttack:[here]

 8/28/2013: “Gen. Mohammad Ali Jafari, chief of Iran's powerful Revolutionary Guards, used stronger rhetoric while talking to the Tasnim news website, saying an attack on Syria would draw in Israel. "The Zionists should know that a U.S. military attack on Syria will not save the fake regime from the resistance but it means the immediate destruction of Israel," Jafari was quoted as saying.” [here]

8/26/2013 ". . . . the Zionist regime will be the first victim of a military attack on Syria,” Iran’s Fars news agency quoted senior parliamentary official Hossein Sheikholeslam as saying on Monday.”[here]

Iran chief of staff, Maj. Gen. Hassan Firouzabadi in a meeting of defense officials in May 2012: “The Iranian nation is standing for its cause and that is the full annihilation of Israel.” [here]

And we could go on and on.

Amazing Resemblance to Hitler's Threats Against Jews:

The form of these threats is very similar to the form of the threat that Hitler made to wipe out the Jews. He said in 1939:

"If the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the bolshevization of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!" [here]

 Note that in this quote Hitler presents himself as pro-peace and as an enemy of international finance capital, as if he were a Marxist-Leninist [as in Lenin's Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism], while at the same time defining Bolshevism as an enemy. Whatever his many faults, Lenin did not write in the book cited that finance capital was Jewish. Moreover, you can see from the quote that Hitler was pretending to be a friend of peace and was blaming the Jews in advance for the world war that he planned to start.

 Furthermore, let's bear in mind that the very name of Hitler's party, for which Nazi was a convenient abbreviation, was a very "Leftist" name. It was officially called the National Socialist German Workers Party [Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP)]. His party was not only socialist but it was a "workers party." You can't ask for more than that.

Iranian officials use another rhetorical device to present themselves as "leftists." In this vein, an Iranian member of parliament identified the regime with "revolutionaries." On 8/27/2013 the semiofficial Fars news agency quoted Mansur Haqiqatpur, an influential member of Parliament, as saying on the preceding Tuesday: “In case of a U.S. military strike against Syria, the flames of outrage of the region’s revolutionaries will point toward the Zionist regime.”

 The resemblance of Iranian threat rhetoric against Israel to Hitler's threats against the Jews is so astoundingly similar as to imply that the Iranian ayatollahs and their minions copied directly from Hitler's rhetoric. Consider this from General Jafari of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards: "The Zionists should know that a U.S. military attack on Syria [if it happens] will not save the fake regime from the resistance but it means the immediate destruction of Israel." This sentence contains an implicit IF clause. That is, IF the US attacks Syria, that means the immediate destruction of Israel. Of all the Iranian statements that I have quoted above, this statement is the one most blatantly similar to Hitler's IF threat of 1939, also quoted above.

All the above makes outrageous the failure of the P5 + 1 powers to make the threats against Israel part of the negotiations with Iran, part of the condemnation of Iran for violating international law. These powers are demonstrating to the world that international law is a sad joke. And that they do not care for Jewish lives.

The international laws are enforced when major powers see fit, when it is in their current interest. Otherwise, the law is just words on paper.

Charles Malik: The West Is the Problem

Anti-Zionism is the anti-imperialism of fools.

Charles Malik was a former president of the UN General Assembly, a former foreign minister of Lebanon, and a professor of philosophy. He was not only a knowledgeable insider in world politics but had the intellect to understand what was happening in a historical perspective. Malik was deeply disappointed by the West's failure to defend Lebanon as --in part and imperfectly-- an outpost of Western civilization in the Middle East. In 1984 he wrote an op ed in the Wall Street Journal where he stated:

For months now the world has been focusing on Lebanon as a problem. The problem is not Lebanon or the importance of Lebanon. The problem is the West. Indeed, the importance of Lebanon is precisely that it raises the problem of the West. Lebanon would never have been a problem if the West itself were not the problem. And the West is not only the problem but also the solution. That is its singular greatness. And the solution is to be true to the deepest value of the West: the primacyof the spirit and the freedom of the soul. [WSJ 3-28-1984]

To confirm what Malik wrote, Lee Smith points out how US policy [he refers mainly to the Obama administration] has befriended the Syrian Assad regime despite its many many offenses against the United States and against Americans:

To survive, Damascus needs the world to ignore what it is up to. It particularly needs indifference in Washington, where the Obama administration has seemed sadly oblivious to the fact that what a regime does at home is indicative of how it will act abroad—or, in the case of Syria, a state sponsor of terror and ally of Iran, how it has acted over the last 40 years, targeting especially American citizens, interests, and allies.
For all that, the administration just wants the Syria issue, the uprising, the opposition, to go away. It would prefer not to deal with it and thus has come up with all sorts of excuses to do just that.
It was five months, and many thousand dead, into the uprising before Obama called on Assad to step down. Instead of leading, the president tasked Syria policy out to Turkey, then to the Arab League, which sent a monitoring delegation led by a former Sudanese intelligence chief suspected of war crimes in Darfur.

Smith goes farther. He argues that its position on Syria, since it asked Assad to leave office, does not indicate real opposition to Assad but rather reluctance to see the Assad clan's fall. Smith raises the question of where the Obama administration and the State Dept really stand:

Unfortunately, the White House has painted itself into a corner. Because the administration has never really wanted to see Assad fall, it has talked only of stopping the violence . . . , with the unstated provision that once the murders stop, the murderer still rules. . . .

The question of where Obama & Co. really stand arises concerning the Iranian nuke bomb project as well. Bear in mind that Iran's ayatollahs are major supporters of the Assad regime and vice versa:

What’s odd is that the White House has let on, through various media surrogates, that it may come to accept the inevitability of the Iranian nuclear program and move toward a policy of containment and deterrence. . . . In its dithering on Syria, the administration shows a lack of seriousness in dealing with Iran. . . .

Yet the Assad regime, going back to 1983 at least, has a record of killing offcial Americans as well as American troops in both Lebanon and Iraq:

Under Assad the Damascus airport was a jihadist transport hub from which foreign fighters were either bused directly to the Iraqi border to fight U.S. troops, or warehoused in Syrian prisons until they could be put to some use. Washington knew very well that Syrian intelligence was working with al Qaeda because it had evidence of it in the Sinjar documents, showing that 90 percent of the foreign fighters in Iraq were coming through Syria. When a series of suicide bombings killed hundreds of Iraqis in the fall of 2009, the Obama administration hushed Iraqi officials who pointed a finger at Damascus. In other words, al Qaeda’s position in Syria was a problem U.S. officials were content to ignore when, with the help of Assad’s intelligence agents, the organization was killing American troops and Iraqis. But now the fact that al Qaeda elements, which may still be under the control of Syrian intelligence, are targeting regime installations, is a reason not to support the opposition [here Smith is pointing at Obama administration hypocrisy]. . . . The regime in Damascus that has so much Syrian blood on its hands also, along with its allies in Iran and Hezbollah, has killed many thousands of Americans. In Lebanon, U.S. Marines, diplomats, and intelligence officials were slaughtered by Iranian and Syrian assets; in Iraq, the Syrians and Iranians backed both Sunni and Shia fighters in their war against American troops, leaving almost 5,000 dead and many more thousands wounded [The Weekly Standard, 5 March 2012]

So the Assad regime in Syria has been an enemy of the United States and of Americans, including rank and file soldiers plus diplomats and intelligence officials. Yet the Syrian Assad regime was being coddled by the State Dept in the mid-1970s, under Kissinger and since then. The Baker-Hamilton Report drawn up for the Bush 2 administration in about 2006 recommended helping solve all Middle Eastern problems by pressuring Israel to give up the Golan Heights to Assad-ruled Syria. Apparently, Israel's welfare was secondary to Assad regime welfare. Or just how does one explain the situation that Lee Smith describes together with my extending the picture of Washington indulgence of the Assads back to the mid-1970s?