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Iran Nuclear Deal Tag

Posted by David Gerstman on May 22, 2016 5 Comments
In his testimony last week before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, concerning the grand Iran deal deception described in a recent New York Times article that was carried out by Obama and Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes, Michael Doran, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, laid out five areas where the White House deceived the American people. First, Doran in his testimony established that even before he became president, Obama had expressed an interest in rapprochement with Iran. He cited former CIA chief and Defense Secretary, Leon Panetta, from The New York Times expose on the echo chamber saying that the administration knew that "They’d have gotten “the [expletive] kicked out of them,” if they had been upfront about their intention to engage Iran. Doran summed it up:

Posted by David Gerstman on May 16, 2016 9 Comments
There continues to be fallout from the profile of Obama adviser Ben Rhodes that appeared in Sunday's New York Times magazine last week. Much of discussion of the article has surrounded who demonstrated bad faith, the Obama administration or Samuels. There are two targets of the criticism. In the MSM and left-leaning media the villain is David Samuels for writing a hatchet job on the administration. In the right-leaning media the villain is the administration for lying about the nuclear deal with Iran. But the question of dishonesty or bad faith is less important than the system Samuel described. From the administration's view, the article was, according to Lee Smith, "a victory lap," a boast of how they bested their political opponents and mastered the media. Little attention has been paid to exactly how the "echo chamber" Ben Rhodes boasted about actually worked.

Posted by Vijeta Uniyal on May 12, 2016 3 Comments
One year after the Obama-backed Nuclear Deal came into effect, Islamic Republic of Iran remains the leading sponsor of international terrorism, says a policy paper published by British policy think-tank Henry Jackson Society. According to the report released on Wednesday at the House of Lords in London, Iran maintains a large and lucrative illegal financing network to bypass the remaining sanction that are in place to stop Tehran from funding terrorist outfits and regime. The report quotes an economist close to current Iranian regime describing the extent of the network, stating that “between 5,000-10,000 people worked in the [illicit financing] network, handling deals worth between $300 billion and $400 billion over the past decade.” Even after easing of sanction by the U.S. and the West, Iran seems to have no intention of giving up this illicit financing network which also acts as a lucrative source of income for the members of the military and the regime.

Posted by Mary Chastain on May 11, 2016 26 Comments
The White House said people should not view President Barack Obama's visit to Hiroshima, Japan, as an apology after they announced he will become the first sitting president to visit the city since the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb on it in 1945. White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest told reporters that if anyone does "interpret it that way, they'll be interpreting it wrongly." Wrongly? So Obama won't say the word "apologize," but is it effectively an apology?

Posted by Mary Chastain on May 09, 2016 9 Comments
Iran's Tasnim agency reported the regime tested a ballistic missile, but the defense minister denied the claims.
“Two weeks ago, we test-fired a missile with a range of 2000 kilometers and a margin of error of eight meters,” declared Brigadier General Ali Abdollahi. "We can guide this ballistic missile."

Posted by David Gerstman on May 06, 2016 33 Comments
Perhaps the most famous person on the internet right now is Ben Rhodes, Obama's Deputy National Security Adviser. Rhodes is profiled in a The New York Times Magazine cover stroy that rips to shreds both the story line sold to the American public and the notion that we have independent media in the age of Obama. Rhodes' job was to message and ensure that the White House's narrative of the nuclear deal with Iran was the media's. Rhodes, in the profile written by David Samuels, displays no shame about his job; in fact he seems quite pleased with himself.

Posted by Vijeta Uniyal on April 12, 2016 3 Comments
Terrorist group Hezbollah is using the conflict in Syria to prepare for a war with Israel, reveals a report published by the UK-based research group BICOM. In 2015, Iran funnelled a billion dollars to the Lebanon-based terrorist group. According to a strategic analysis released by Britain Israel Communications & Research Centre (BICOM) on Monday, Iran-backed Hezbollah's missile stockpile is now estimated to be around 100,000-150,000, with large portion of it hidden among Lebanon's civilian population. Hezbollah entered the Syrian civil war 5 years ago to fight on behalf of Iran-backed dictator Bashar Al Assad. Since then 5,000 of its 20,000-strong fighting force is pinned down in Syria. The terrorist militia now controls territory within Syria, creating a base for Iran -- a fallback option in case Assad regime were to collapse. The Obama-Kerry Nuclear Deal gave Iran a signing bonus of  $150 billion. Flushed with fresh cash, regime in Tehran is making up for the past cuts it had to make in funding its proxy terrorist group across the Middle East including Hezbollah.

Posted by David Gerstman on April 01, 2016 4 Comments
Last July, we responded to President Barack Obama's challenge to read the nuclear deal he made with Iran and concluded that it was awful. One of the worst parts of the deal was language (appearing twice) that said, "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." Or in the words of Mark Dubowitz, executive director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, this is Iran's "nuclear snapback."

Posted by Vijeta Uniyal on March 29, 2016 14 Comments
Remember the famous ‘snapping back’ of sanctions that President Obama promised last year if Iran were to violate the Nuclear Agreement? The New York Times had hailed the ‘snap back’ as a diplomatic masterstroke, writing “snapback mechanism [to reimpose sanctions on Iran] is one of the most unusual parts of the deal. In the event that Iran is perceived as violating it, the agreement allows the full raft of penalties to resume automatically.” Well guess what, Iran continues to violate the Nuclear Deal and President Obama’s ‘full raft’ is nowhere to be seen. Obama Administration has instead responded reluctantly to Islamic Republic of Iran’s repeated testing of ballistic missiles capable to carrying nuclear warheads by blacklisting a handful of Iranian companies.

Posted by Jonathan Levin on March 25, 2016 1 Comment
In another demonstration of President Obama's inability to formulate a coherent policy in the face of fresh Iranian violations of missile test bans, the United States both imposed new sanctions on and eased trade with Iran on the same day on Thursday. Iran's renewed aggression is unmistakable even to those whose willful blindness wrought the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action ("JCPOA").

New Sanctions In Response to Iranian Missile Tests

Earlier this month, Iran conducted two days of tests in violation of UN resolutions.  At least one of the missiles had "Israel must be wiped of the face of the earth" written on it.  These violations prompted many lawmakers to call for new sanctions on Iran, including Hillary Clinton and a number of Republican Congressmen.

Posted by Fuzzy Slippers on March 20, 2016 10 Comments
It seems that Iran is having trouble getting the Obama administration to understand just how little it respects or fears Obama's America. They do keep trying, though.  They bully and cajole the Obama admin while dangling empty promises and outright lies before them, and they repeatedly declare that their goal is, first, the destruction of Israel (wipe Israel off the map), and second, the destruction of the United States (we're the "big" Satan after Israel's "little" Satan.). That's okay, the Obama admin assures us, Iran doesn't mean what its leaders say (there may be a certain amount of projection here).  Iran does love and respect—if not America then—its fearful leader. Iran's theocratic leadership shakes its head in disbelief  . . . and pure joy.  How weak! How malleable! How ineffectual!  Iran loves a weak American president as Jimmy Carter found out to the detriment of his second term dreams.

Posted by Vijeta Uniyal on March 08, 2016 3 Comments
John Kerry’s Iranian “partner for peace” has spoken again. This time calling for an all-out war against Israel, the only trustworthy U.S. alley in the Middle East. Iran’s foreign minister Javad Zarif, who also negotiated the now-infamous Nuclear Deal, seems to enjoy a great personal relationship with Kerry and they both even call each other by their first names. According to Financial Times, Javad and John are “two affable men who struck a relationship that transcended the stubborn enmity between their nations.” President Obama too has a great regard for the Iranian dictator Ayatollah Khamenei, or as he likes to calls him, the “Supreme Leader.” President Obama praised Ayatollah's Fatwa or religious edict against nuclear weapons.

Posted by Vijeta Uniyal on February 18, 2016 7 Comments
With each passing day, it gets more and more difficult to ignore the monumental disaster that Obama’s foreign policy actually is. Nowhere is its utter failure more glaringly evident than in the Syrian Civil War. But first, let us not underestimate the pathologies of the Middle East that have led to the present disaster in Syria, but Obama administration’s policies have created perils that we would be dealing with, in decades to come. The geopolitical vacuum created by President Obama’s push to shrink America’s footprint in the Middle East has quickly been filled by Comrade Putin’s soviet-style jackboots. And President Obama-backed Nuclear Deal has single-handedly contributed billions of dollars to Islamic Republic of Iran’s war chest geared at funding global terrorism and regional adventures.

Posted by David Gerstman on February 10, 2016 2 Comments
While President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry have assured us that the nuclear deal with Iran has delayed war, Tony Badran in a devastating critique of the administration's foreign policy last week wrote, "Middle Easterners are not so lucky: They get to fight their wars with Iran right now." Back in 2014, Badran noted, President Obama said of the turmoil in the Middle East, "A lot of it has to do with changes that are taking place in the Middle East in which an old order that had been in place for 50 years, 60 years, 100 years was unsustainable, and was going to break up at some point. And now, what we are seeing is the old order not working, but the new order not being born yet -- and it is a rocky road through that process, and a dangerous time through that process." But a few months earlier, Obama, in an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg, made very clear that his intent was to make Iran an agent of changing the orders. When Goldberg asked him why the Sunni states seem to fear him so much Obama answered, "I think that there are shifts that are taking place in the region that have caught a lot of them off guard. I think change is always scary. I think there was a comfort with a United States that was comfortable with an existing order and the existing alignments, and was an implacable foe of Iran, even if most of that was rhetorical and didn't actually translate into stopping the nuclear program. But the rhetoric was good. What I've been saying to our partners in the region is, 'We've got to respond and adapt to change.'"

Posted by Vijeta Uniyal on February 09, 2016 6 Comments
On Saturday, Madeleine Albright introduced Hillary Clinton at an event in New Hampshire, telling the crowd: “There is a special place in hell” for women who do not support Clinton. Madeleine Albright (78) served as Secretary of State under the Clinton Administration, the same administration that gave us the now-defunct nuclear deal with North Korea. Finalized in 1994, Clinton's deal was used by the Communist Regime as a cover to build a nuclear bomb. At the time, President Bill Clinton called it "a good deal for the United States", ensuring that "North Korea will freeze and then dismantle its nuclear program. South Korea and our other allies will be better protected. The entire world will be safer as we slow the spread of nuclear weapons." Fast forward to 2016; North Korea ushers in the New Year with blasting a 20-50 megaton Hydrogen Bomb and than last week tops it with launched a dual-use ballistic missile capable of reaching the U.S. soil. The test that North Korea wants to sell the world as a satellite launch, is just another leap for communist regime towards a inter-continental nuclear-weapon delivery system.

Posted by Jonathan Levin on February 04, 2016 11 Comments
The disastrous JCPOA and President Obama's political compulsion to hide Iranian wrong-doing have infected the entire Democratic Party.  Instead of responding to Iran's support for terrorism and violations of its international commitments by imposing penalties, President Obama - and now his Democratic allies in Congress - are running cover. David Gerstmen wrote last month that "Obama’s Passivity in Face of Aggression Puts Iran in Driver’s Seat" and
in October, Iran tested a nuclear-capable ballistic missile that was later determined by the United Nations to have been in violation of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1929.  The administration, in response to Congressional pressure, was set to impose new sanctions on Iran at the end of 2015, but retreated when threatened by Iran.
Rather than leave Obama exposed to more embarrassment if he has to veto or block an Iran sanctions bill, Senate Democrats are trying to do the work for him.  According to The Hill:

Posted by Vijeta Uniyal on February 02, 2016 5 Comments
According to the head of Iran’s state-run oil company NPC, two leading German companies are set to invest a total of €12 billion in Tehran’s petroleum and gas sector. The latest agreement could make Germany the first big foreign investor in Iranian oil sector, after the nuclear deal was signed seven months ago. Once the deal is finalized, these German firms will start setting up petrochemical plants in Assaluyeh in southern Iran. Mullahs in Tehran plan to get 6 unfinished petrochemical projects off the ground, which could double Iran’s annual oil revenue. Germany has been the biggest European beneficiary of the Iranian Nuclear Deal. As German companies hoping to get up to €6 billion in back payments from Tehran, once country’s banking assets are unfrozen as part of the Obama-backed deal.

Posted by Mike LaChance on January 22, 2016 11 Comments
If you had any concerns about Obama's Iran Deal rest assured, the news only gets worse. Speaking to a CNBC panel yesterday, John Kerry admitted that some of the money the U.S. is giving to Iran is likely to end up in the hands of terror groups. CNN reports:
John Kerry: Some sanctions relief money for Iran will go to terrorism Secretary of State John Kerry acknowledged to CNBC Thursday that some of the money Iran received in sanctions relief would go to groups considered terrorists. When asked about whether some the $150 billion in sanctions relief to Iran would go to terrorist groups, Kerry reiterated that, after settling debts, Iran would receive closer to $55 billion. He conceded some of that could go to groups considered terrorists, saying there was nothing the U.S. could do to prevent that.
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