Caroline Glick covers our imminent arrangement with Iran in her Newsweek column “Biden Shatters Israel’s Delusions.” She provides a handy summary of the gathering storm (please forgive the long quote):
[L]ast Wednesday, Gabriel Noronha, a former Iran specialist at the State Department, published details of the concessions Malley has already agreed to on his Twitter feed. Noronha wrote that he received the details of the U.S. concessions from his former colleagues at the State Department and National Security Council, as well as from the European Union delegations to the talks. Noronha wrote that his associates, all “career” officers rather than political appointees, “are so concerned with the concessions being made by Rob Malley in Vienna that they’ve allowed me to publish some details of the coming deal in the hopes that Congress will act to stop the capitulation.”
Malley’s capitulation includes delisting Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps from the State Department’s list of Foreign Terror Organizations and ending U.S. sanctions on Iran’s senior terror masters—including the terror chiefs responsible for the massacre of 241 U.S. Marines at the Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983 and the 1994 bombing of the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires in 1994, where 85 people were killed.
Malley has agreed to end sanctions on 112 entities and people tied to Iranian dictator Ali Khamenei, through which Khamenei has accrued massive wealth and organized Iran’s global terror and weapons procurement networks. Malley is willing to end sanctions on Iranian entities and individuals involved in the torture and murder of Iranian civilians.
All told, Noronha’s colleagues said Malley has agreed to sanctions relief that will provide Iran with an immediate cash infusion of $90 billion, as well as an additional $50-55 billion annually in oil and gas profits.
On the nuclear front, beyond a few formalities, Biden’s deal will enable Iran to move full-speed ahead with its development of advanced centrifuges and continue its race to the nuclear finish line. All limitations—which are largely unenforceable—will be removed in two and a half years. And Iran’s nuclear program, which constitutes a material breach of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty of which Iran is a signatory, will be legitimated by the UN and the U.S. government.
All of these concessions guarantee two consequences. First, Iran will go to war. As U.S. Army Col. (res.) Joel Rayburn, who served as Trump’s envoy to Syria and in a range of senior positions related to the Middle East in Central Command, the National Security Council and the State Department explained in a recent interview with Newsweek, with the JCPOA’s implementation in 2015, Iran received billions of dollars in sanctions relief. It used the funds to expand its wars against Israel, against U.S. forces deployed in the Middle East and against Iran’s Sunni Arab neighbors the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. Iran fought its various foes both directly and through its proxies in Iraq, Yemen, Syria, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories.
The $90 billion that Malley and his colleagues in the Biden administration are poised to now give Iran guarantee that Iran will massively escalate its aggression against these actors.
The second consequence of the new nuclear deal is that Iran will become a nuclear-armed state unless Israel attacks and destroys a sufficient number of Iran’s nuclear installations to significantly scale back Iran’s nuclear capabilities.
The Wall Street Journal’s Laurence Norman reports this morning that “Iran Chief Negotiator Unexpectedly Leaves Vienna as Nuclear Talks Hit Standstill.” Subhead: “Ali Bagheri-Kani says he will return to the negotiations soon, but Western diplomats warn the talks could fail” (“Mr. Bagheri-Kani’s sudden departure raises the prospect that the Vienna negotiations on reviving the 2015 nuclear deal, which have dragged on for 11 months, could fail”). I stand by my assessment with a moderate degree of confidence that this is nothing that can’t be resolved by the administration with the friends of Vladimir Putin.
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