My article from the April 9, 2015 issue of FrontPage magazine:
Obama’s Pro-Iranian Nukes Propaganda Barrage
By Matthew Vadum
President Obama and his media minions are trying hard to sell the public on the administration’s egregiously awful nuclear arms deal that will empower an Islamofascist country whose leaders have never stopped chanting “death to America.”
Under the preliminary so-called framework for an arms control agreement that Western powers reached last week with Iran’s murderous mullahs, the pariah nation reportedly accepted limits on its nuclear weapons program in exchange for the repeal of international sanctions that have hurt its economy. Negotiators have until June 30 to arrive at a final agreement. The speed at which sanctions will be repealed and the scope of inspections have yet to be worked out.
This means the relentless stream of pro-framework propaganda from the administration is just beginning.
Tellingly, the fact that Iran long ago signed a nuclear nonproliferation treaty, which makes any attempt to obtain nuclear weapons a grave violation of international law, has never been an obstacle to that country’s ongoing efforts to build nuclear bombs.
How does Obama know the notorious treaty-breakers of Iran are sincere? And if Iran’s nuclear program were truly peaceful, why would the Iranians put their facilities deep underground where Israel bombs cannot reach them?
The short answer to both questions is that he doesn’t. Obama simply doesn’t care.
Obama has sent envoys to Congress to try to frighten lawmakers out of passing legislation to rein in his Iranian adventures in nuclear nonproliferation and his allies are speaking out in the media and churning out superficially reasonable op-eds that praise the diplomatic effort and its goals.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said essentially that Congress should abdicate its constitutional responsibility and let President Obama do whatever he wants.
She came out swinging against a proposal by Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) and Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.). Their measure would force Obama to send the text of the final Iran deal to Congress for review over a 60-day period during which the president would be forbidden from lifting the sanctions on Iran that lawmakers previously imposed.
“Diplomacy has taken us to a framework agreement founded on vigilance and enforcement, and these negotiations must be allowed to proceed unencumbered,” Pelosi said. “Sen. Corker’s legislation undermines these international negotiations and represents an unnecessary hurdle to achieving a strong, final agreement.”
Meanwhile, Obama has never explained why he’s so enamored of a nation that routinely executes gays for the crime of being gay, female rape victims for being raped, and members of unapproved religions for not being Muslim. Nor has he verbalized why he expects Iran to magically abide by the terms of the framework after failing to comply with United Nations resolutions.
Obama dismisses [1] the impassioned pleas of critics who complain that the U.S. and other nations negotiating with Iran gave away too much by allowing that country to keep much of its nuclear infrastructure intact.
The Saul Alinsky radical lied as he always does when anything major or minor is at stake, calling the bogus nonproliferation framework a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity” to stop Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, while simultaneously pushing for change in the Middle East.
“This is our best bet by far to make sure Iran doesn’t get a nuclear weapon,” he said. “What we will be doing even as we enter into this deal is sending a very clear message to the Iranians and to the entire region that if anybody messes with Israel, America will be there.”
Of course, while he pretends to care about Israeli national security, President Obama is the one who has been messing [2] with Israel. It was just days ago that Obama White House chief of staff Denis McDonough blasted Israel in a speech, saying “An occupation that has lasted more than 50 years must end.”
Obama’s State Department abruptly denied [3] a request by Israel to require in the pact that Iran recognize Israel’s right to exist. “This is an agreement that doesn’t deal with any other issues, nor should it,” said spokeswoman Marie Harf.
And last month as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was about to address a joint session of the U.S. Congress, the Obama administration leaked a top-secret memo detailing Israel’s nuclear secrets. The report goes into intricate detail about the Israeli nuclear weapons program and explains that country became a nuclear power in the 1970s and 1980s.
Israel has never officially acknowledged it possesses a nuclear arsenal, reportedly in order to avoid a regional arms race. By releasing the memo, the U.S. government breached an informal agreement with Israel to not communicate publicly about its nuclear weapons.
The Obama administration also used U.S. taxpayer dollars in an unsuccessful effort to defeat Netanyahu in the March 17 Knesset elections. The money went to a radical anti-Israel group, OneVoice International, that in turn worked with V15, an Israeli group whose unofficial motto was said to be “anyone but Bibi” Netanyahu.
Obama operatives temporarily relocated to Israel to try to take out Netanyahu. OneVoice hired Obama campaign aides such as Jeremy Bird of political consulting powerhouse 270 Strategies. Bird was national field director for Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign.
Over the weekend Netanyahu attacked the framework, saying it was “a dream deal for Iran and it’s a nightmare deal for the world.”
Obama claims such criticism hurts his feelings. It has been “personally difficult,” he said, to be labeled as anti-Israel because he differs with Netanyahu on various issues such as Iran.
“There has to be the ability for me to disagree with a policy on settlements, for example, without being viewed as … opposing Israel,” Obama said.
Talking to the people of the Jewish state, Obama opined that “there is no formula, there is no option, to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon that will be more effective than the diplomatic initiative and framework that we put forward — and that’s demonstrable.”
Actually, it’s not demonstrable. There is no reason to trust Iran on anything. It’s an outlaw nation.
Iran is the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism [4] according to the U.S. State Department, yet Obama suddenly wants to reward it for its savagery, including the 1979 seizure of 52 American hostages, terrorist attacks against U.S. interests, and numerous examples of unprovoked military aggression. Even now Iran, whose leaders are trying to resurrect the old Persian empire, harbors senior members of al-Qaeda and continues funding and otherwise assisting terrorist operations around the world. Shiite Iran is trying to form an Islamic Caliphate it can dominate while the Sunnis of Islamic State are already in the process of creating an Islamic Caliphate on their own while assiduously adopting the same brutal methods that their prophet Mohammed used to spread Islam at the point of a sword in the 7th century A.D.
It is axiomatic that any American deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran is a bad deal.
But all these concerns are water under the bridge, according to President Obama, whose affection for Islamist Iran now threatens to set the world on fire for decades to come.
Don’t worry about Iran because its current military budget is so tiny that it couldn’t possibly threaten U.S. national security, he said. The United States, whose military Obama has been systematically gutting for years, is strong enough to reach out to traditional adversaries like Iran, Burma, and Communist Cuba without endangering the nation, he argued.
“If it turns out that it doesn’t lead to better outcomes, we can adjust our policies,” Obama said. “The same is true with respect to Iran, a larger country, a dangerous country, one that has engaged in activities that resulted in the death of U.S. citizens, but the truth of the matter is: Iran’s defense budget is $30 billion. Our defense budget is closer to $600 billion. Iran understands that they cannot fight us.”
It’s rhetorical misdirection, an Obama favorite.
The issue is not what Iran’s military budget is now; the issue is whether one of the most evil regimes on the planet Earth should be allowed to carry on with its nuclear program, which everyone knows is aimed at nuclear weaponization, not at helping the growing nation meet its future domestic energy needs. A nuclear bomb is the ultimate equalizer for a nasty Third World nation with a chip on its shoulder: once Iran has the bomb no one will care what that country’s defense budget is. Iran will be able to blackmail its enemies at will, so trusting its leaders to abandon their decades-long quest for nukes is foolhardy in the extreme.
Left-wing talking heads have been flooding the media with sympathetic comments aimed at bolstering Obama’s atrocious agreement in the making.
Madeleine Albright, President Clinton’s secretary of state, told MSNBC that the framework is “a good deal” that “meets our core objectives” and has “cut off a way for Iran to develop a nuclear program.”
MSNBC’s famously fact-averse Rachel Maddow attacked Republicans for having the temerity to oppose an agreement that stands to set the world on fire. Poor President Obama just can’t get a break, she opined on her April 2 show.
“The Republican reaction to the announcement of this framework and the president’s remarks about it today is exactly what you would expect. Six years into his presidency, though, we know that’s how they would react even if he was announcing that he had personally cured cancer,” she said. “They would then be against that cure.”
Joe Cirincione, president of the dangerously kooky far-left Ploughshares Fund, joined Maddow in popping champagne corks on her TV show.
The biggest breakthrough in the “historic agreement” is that Iran “has agreed to an unprecedented level of inspection,” said a beaming Cirincione. “Such a deal has never been negotiated in the history of the nuclear age before.”
As he jabbed Republicans, Cirincione’s enthusiasm for the pact was undiminished despite Islamic Iran’s long history of cheating on international agreements.
“The people who’ve been opposed to this deal for political or ideological reasons are still going to be opposed to it. But this deal is so sweeping, it is so stunning in its detail that it’s going to be very hard to resist it.”
Cirincione is no well-intentioned neutral third party. The Ploughshares Fund he runs “has a long history of anti-war advocacy and is a partner of the Marxist-oriented Institute for Policy Studies, which has urged the defunding of the Pentagon and massive decreases in U.S. defense capabilities, including slashing the American nuclear arsenal to 292 deployed weapons,” WND’s Aaron Klein writes [5].
Ploughshares “has also partnered with a who’s who of the radical left, including Code Pink, the pro-Palestinian J Street, United for Peace & Justice, the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation and the Demos progressive group, where Obama’s former green jobs czar, Van Jones, serves on the board.”
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| Iran fan Peter Beinart at right |
Probably the most amusing pro-framework commentary has come from Israel antagonist Peter Beinart who is overjoyed that the deal will empower Iran. His Atlantic magazine column [6] brims with irrational exuberance.
“[T]he details aren’t what matters,” he wrote. “What matters is the potential end of America’s 36-year-long cold war with Iran.”
J Street-loving media darling Beinart compared Obama favorably with Presidents Nixon and Reagan, chief executives who actually understood foreign policy. Ushering Iran into the nuclear age will make America more, not less, powerful, he argued:
What George W. Bush failed to achieve militarily, Barack Obama may now be achieving diplomatically. In recent weeks, American hawks have cited Saudi anxiety about a potential Iran deal as reason to be wary of one. But a big part of the reason the Saudis are worried is because they know that as U.S.-Iranian relations improve, their influence over the United States will diminish. That doesn’t mean the U.S.-Saudi alliance will disintegrate. Even if it frays somewhat, the United States still needs Saudi oil and Saudi Arabia still needs American protection. But the United States may soon have a better relationship with both Tehran and Riyadh than either has with the other, which was exactly what Richard Nixon orchestrated in the three-way dynamic between Washington, Moscow, and Beijing in the 1970s. And today, as then, that increases America’s leverage over both countries.
Obama “has now begun the process of ending America’s smaller, but still terrible, cold war with Iran,” wrote Beinart. “In so doing, he has improved America’s strategic position, brightened the prospects for Iranian freedom and Middle Eastern peace, and brought himself closer to being the kind of transformational, Reaganesque president he always hoped to be.”
There is the heart of the modern American Left laid bare, exposed for everyone to see.
The United States was wrong to punish Iran for its many transgressions. America, after all, was the oppressor; Iran, its helpless victim. Sanctions against the totalitarian, terrorism-sponsoring state were part of a “terrible” cold war with Iran.
As America-hating leftists see it, Barack Hussein Obama is exactly the right man to remedy all these past U.S.-inflicted injustices against Iran.
The problem is that America, and the rest of the world, will ultimately pay the price for the Obama administration’s wantonly reckless, suicidal policies.