The White House has essentially outsourced its Iran negotiations to Putin’s envoy. Iran appears poised to reap tens of billions.
STOPIRANNOW.ORG Via Andrew McCarthy - NationalReview
Russia’s unprovoked brutalization of Ukraine includes the likelihood of additional war crimes involving attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure, as Jim further detailed in today’s Jolt. (Jim notes, among other horribles, the deployment in urban areas of thermobaric multiple-rockets launchers, which Ukraine claims have been not merely deployed but used.)
How hair-raising, then, that we must turn our attention to the fact that, even as Russia was marshaling its invasion forces, the Biden administration was relying on Russia as its principal intermediary in the negotiations with Iran. It’s doubly humiliating: The president and his envoy, appeasement aficionado Rob Malley, have turned to a rogue for help because the other rogue they are pleading with for a deal won’t deign to negotiate directly with the United States.
How hair-raising, then, that we must turn our attention to the fact that, even as Russia was marshaling its invasion forces, the Biden administration was relying on Russia as its principal intermediary in the negotiations with Iran. It’s doubly humiliating: The president and his envoy, appeasement aficionado Rob Malley, have turned to a rogue for help because the other rogue they are pleading with for a deal won’t deign to negotiate directly with the United States.
Last week in our pages, my friend Victoria Coates, former Trump-administration deputy national-security adviser for Middle Eastern and South African affairs, related that Malley has been collaborating on the Iran negotiations with Russia’s lead diplomat, Mikhail Ulyanov. As Victoria pointed out, “when the negotiations foundered in late December of last year, Ulyanov was credited with bringing them back on track and setting the conditions to reach a new deal in 2022.”
In January, NBC News reported on some of these conditions. They included this stunner: “Tehran would be required to stop enriching uranium up to 60 percent purity and dispose of its current stockpile, possibly by exporting it to Russia, along with other restrictions.” A key component of the Obama-era Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) was Iran’s willingness to park its enriched uranium — which, at the time, wasn’t as close to weapons-grade as the current 60 percent — in Russia. Later, Iran would get the uranium back from Russia if they decided that the U.S. was not complying with its obligations.
On Wednesday, a lengthy tweet thread by former State Department official Gabriel Noronha appeared to confirm some of our worst suspicions about Biden’s mutton-headed dalliance with the monsters of Moscow and Tehran. Noronha says that his former colleagues “are so concerned with the concessions” that Malley is making to the Iranians in the Vienna negotiations that they okayed Noronha’s publication of the gory details, in “hopes that Congress will act to stop the capitulation.” He elaborated:
“What’s happening in Vienna is a total disaster” one warned. The entire negotiations have been filtered and “essentially run” by Russian diplomat Mikhail Ulyanov. The concessions and other misguided policies have led three members of the U.S. negotiating team to leave.
Essentially, Noronha alleges that, in coordination with Russia, the Biden administration has “promised to lift sanctions on some of the regime’s worst terrorists and torturers, leading officials in the regime’s WMD infrastructure, and is currently trying to lift sanctions on the IRGC itself.” The IRGC, of course, is the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which our government has formally designated as a foreign terrorist organization based on its rich history of materially supporting jihadist terrorism, including the killing of 19 U.S. Air Force personnel at Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia in 1996.
Others who would benefit from sanctions relief include Iranian officials complicit in Hezbollah’s 1983 bombing of the U.S. Marine compound in Beirut, which killed 241 U.S. and 58 French military personnel in addition to several civilians. Also benefiting would be Iranians complicit in Hezbollah’s 1994 bombing in Buenos Aires of the Argentine Israelite Mutual Association building, which killed 85 people and wounded hundreds.
This is just breathtaking. Among the JCPOA’s many atrocious features was that, besides merely delaying rather than halting the Tehran regime’s pursuit of nuclear weapons, it turned a blind eye to the terrorism that Iran has for decades directed at the U.S. and our allies, especially Israel. That was unconscionable, but at least it left terrorism-related sanctions in effect. If Noronha is right, those designations and sanctions will now be lifted, even though (a) they are unrelated to Iran’s nuclear work, and (b) some of them were in response to activity in which Iran engaged after the JCPOA took effect.
In return, Iran would reap about $90 billion in immediate sanctions relief, and $50 billion to $55 billion in additional revenue from higher oil and petrochemical exports. There would be no restrictions on how Iran spends this windfall — no limits on its terror promotion, wars through jihadist proxies, ballistic-missile development, and hostage-taking. In fact, on the subject of hostage-taking, the Biden administration would reportedly cause the release of $7 billion in frozen Iranian assets held in South Korea, in exchange for the release of four Americans, and perhaps some Brits, currently imprisoned in Iran. That is, the deal would resemble the ransom Obama paid for hostages in order to get Iran’s agreement to the JCPOA; the mullahs would be reminded that hostage-taking pays.
So . . . even as Russia was encircling Ukraine with an invasion force of 150,000, even as Russia continued occupying Crimea and other territories annexed from Ukraine and Georgia, the Biden administration was eagerly confederating with Putin’s envoy in order to revive an arrangement with Russia’s client, Iran (the “Death to America” guys) — an arrangement that is a disaster for American national security. If you were wondering why Vladimir Putin, as he continues pulverizing Ukrainian civilians, does not seem too fazed about the U.S. reaction, that’s why.