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| Our Trump will not allow Iran to keep on terrorizing the people of Iran. |
In 2012, then-president Obama said, “The deal we’ll accept is [that] they end their nuclear program.” In 2013, the French foreign minister said he was wary of being sucked into a “con game” re: Iranian uranium enrichment In 2015, then-secretary of state John Kerry said, “We don’t recognize the right [of Iran] to enrich [uranium].”
The deal has been exposed as a failure on these points (as well as many others) and the U.S. decided to pull out. So what in store for the mullahs now? Here’s the basis of the U.S. plan:
1. Sanctions are going back in full effect and new ones are coming.
Last week, the U.S.sanctioned the head of Iran’s central bank and other entities funneling money to the IRGC Quds Force, Hezbollah and other terrorist organizations. “This is just the beginning,” Pompeo said. “Iran will be forced to make a choice: Either fight to keep its economy off life support at home or keep squandering precious wealth on fights abroad. It will not have the resources to do both.”
2. Iranian aggression will be stymied.
Pompeo said the Defense Department and the U.S.’s regional allies will work together to: assure freedom of navigation in regional waters, squash Iran’s cyber activity, track down and crush Iranian operatives and their Hezbollah proxies operating around the world, end for good Iranian ability to dominate the Middle East, & cause “bigger problems than [Iran] ever had before” if the regime restarts its nuclear program.
3. Advocate tirelessly for the Iranian people.
Economically (for Iran to stop wasting its money abroad in foreign wars), For human rights (including for women not to be forced to wear a hijab), & Against government mismanagement of natural resources (which caused serious environmental crises)
4. For a new agreement including sanctions relief, Iran must meet 12 basic demands:
- Come clean to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) about all prior military dimensions of its nuclear program and permanently and verifiably abandon such work in perpetuity
- Stop enriching uranium and never pursue plutonium
reprocessing, including closing its heavy water reactor
- Provide the IAEA with unqualified access to all
sites throughout the entire country
- End its proliferation of ballistic missiles and
halt further launching or development of nuclear-capable missile systems
- Release all U.S. citizens, as well as citizens of
U.S. partners and allies (all have been detained on spurious charges)
- End support to Middle East terrorist groups,
including Hezbollah, Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad
- Respect the sovereignty of the Iraqi government
and permit the disarming, demobilization and reintegration of Shiite militias
- End military support for the Houthi militia and
work towards a peaceful political settlement in Yemen
- Withdraw all forces under Iranian command in
Syria
- End support for the Taliban and other terrorists
in Afghanistan and the region and cease harboring senior al-Qaeda leaders
- End the IRG Quds Force’s support for terrorists
and militant partners around the world
- End threatening behavior against neighbors — including Israel, Saudi
Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — as well as against international shipping
concerns and end cyberattacks
The plan is, ambitious, but as Pompeo said, “Ali Khamenei has been supreme leader since 1989. He will not live forever, nor will the Iranian people abide [by] the rigid rules of tyrants forever.”
Iran was on its knees due to crippling sanctions when it came to the table to negotiate the nuclear deal. If the U.S. had kept up those sanctions and supported the Iranian people in the 2009 Green Movement against its leaders, it is possible that the ayatollah wouldn’t be around today terrorizing his people and the world at large.
We now understand why then-president Obama had a hands-off attitude during this volatile and potentially revolutionary time in Iran; his single-focused and misguided desire to negotiate with Iran at any cost (witness his squashing of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration investigations and arrests of Hezbollah agents to pave the way for his “legacy deal”).
But the deal didn’t work. Obama may have thought that sanctions relief would motivate Iran to join the “family of nations.” He may have thought that an empowered Iran would be the key to balance the centuries-old Sunni-Shiite animosity.
Yet that thinking was flawed as it didn’t take into account the ideologically-driven desire for dominance of the ayatollahs and their true reason for taking over the country in the 1979 Islamic revolution (even the Iranian people underestimated that).
Moreover, the Obama administration’s blinders — as well as the European’s desire to reap the enormous economic benefits of being able to do business with Iran – both contributed to willingness on the part of the West to be duped by Iran and enter into a toothless deal. The hope is the Trump administration’s new plan will reverse all that.
