Syria’s use of chemical weapons should frighten you about obama’s deal with Iran

 
Accolades from both sides of the aisle and from foreign policy experts continue to flow to Donald Trump for his surgical strike in Syria.

Christopher Kozak, a Syria analyst at the Institute for the Study of War, agreed the strike was a necessary development toward reestablishing U.S. deterrence, but stressed that the administration needs to persist in deterrent measures to reap lasting results.

“The key point is that outside actors are going to be perceiving that this is a world where the U.S. and the White House will be willing to use military force in order to assert itself in a way that the U.S. has not been doing for quite some time now,” Kozak said in an interview.

“But if this isn’t followed through with a larger strategy to achieve our national security objectives, if it’s not followed through with sustained pressure on Assad and his backers, then it really accomplishes little and may even be counterproductive depending on the reactions its provokes from other actors,” he added.

Kozak and Schanzer emphasized the need for the administration to take on Syria with a two-pronged strategy that addresses both the Islamic State and the Assad regime. Kozak said the administration will fail in its fight against ISIS unless it deploys diplomatic and military action to strike a negotiated settlement between the Syrian government and rebel groups.

Even Fareed Zakaria was impressed:

Trump’s actions also brought out the mental illness in democrats. Lawrence O’Donnell went off the rails:

O’Donnell said, “[W]ouldn’t it be nice if it was just completely, totally, absolutely impossible to suspect that Vladimir Putin orchestrated what happened in Syria this week so that his friend in the White House could have a big night, with missiles, and all of the praise he’s picked up over the last 24 hours? Wouldn’t it be so nice if you couldn’t even in your wildest dreams imagine a scenario like that?”

Another idiot democrat (but I repeat myself) suggested that Trump might have been distracting from his collusion with Putin by destroying tens of millions of dollars in Putin’s assets. You can’t make this stuff up.

Syria’s use of chemical weapons this week made one thing very clear- the obama administration was made up of liars and fools. They assured us that all chemical weapons were removed from Assad’s hands. As recently as January the inveterate serial liar Susan Rice spoke about how the obama administration had so skillfully removed all the chemical weapons from Syria:

But one administration success, she noted, was that “we were able to find a solution that didn’t necessitate the use of force that actually removed the chemical weapons that were known from Syria, in a way that the use of force would never have accomplished.”

“Our aim in contemplating the use of force following the use of chemical weapons in August of 2013 was not to intervene in the civil war, not to become involved in the combat between Assad and the opposition, but to deal with the threat of chemical weapons by virtue of the diplomacy that we did with Russia and with the [United Nations] Security Council,” Rice continued.

“We were able to get the Syrian government to voluntarily and verifiably give up its chemical weapons stockpile,” she argued.

All of them. Verifiably! 100% of them, said John F’n Kerry:

Rice isn’t the only Obama-era official who made self-congratulatory statements about removing chemical weapons from Syria.

In July 2014, then-Secretary of State John Kerry went on NBC’s “Meet the Press” to discuss the September 2013 deal that resulted in Russia agreeing to help confiscate and then destroy Syria’s stockpile.

“We struck a deal where we got 100 percent of the chemical weapons out,” Kerry claimed.

That sorry sack of obama-water carrying crap known as Politifact rated the 100% removal of chemical weapons from Syria as “Mostly true.” They have had to eat those words and now have withdrawn the rating. Former Admiral John Kirby, who forever ruined his reputation becoming a mouthpiece for barack obama, tried mightily to rewrite history:

“We knew that we got the vast majority of the declared stockpiles out, and at the time we said, as well as OPCW [Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons], that we couldn’t guarantee that there weren’t undeclared stockpiles still in the country, or that we could negate his [Assad’s] ability to acquire or create more,” Kirby said.

“It is something we were mindful of at the time,” the former State Department spokesman continued. “It is obviously carried out to a disastrous effect here this week, but we were careful at the time not to say that we knew we got every single stockpile of every single chemical weapon out of Syria.”

You were? Kirby seems ignorant of what his Secretary of State said without any doubt:

“We struck a deal where we got 100 percent of the chemical weapons out,”

You can file Kirby’s words along with “You can keep your doctor and your plan.” There are other words which belong in that same pile of trash:

“We cannot have a situation where chemical or biological weapons are falling into the hands of the wrong people,” Obama told reporters at the White House. “We have been very clear to the Assad regime — but also to other players on the ground — that a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized.
“That would change my calculus; that would change my equation.”

But it didn’t. Not only did they lie about removing all the chemical weapons, the obama gang knew there was more Sarin- a lot more. Mark Hemingway points it out:

In Congressional testimony last February, Obama’s Director of National Intelligence James Clapper acknowledged “gaps and inconsistencies in Syria’s declaration,” validating reports that Syria was still hiding banned chemicals at undisclosed locations. And on its way out the door in January of this year, the Obama Treasury quietly introduced new sanctions against Syrian officials involved in chemical warfare. Buried in the language sanctioning a particular official was a telling admission: “As of 2016, Abbas has continued operating at locations in Syria associated with chemical warfare-related missions.”

Whether or not the Obama Administration knew of this particular sarin facility, then, they clearly knew that Syrians were still clinging to their stockpiles at several locations. They knew what Adam Garfinkle has been saying all along: that Obama’s deal to remove chemical weapons was not a historic diplomatic triumph but an unenforceable sham that the Syrians and Russians never intended to comply with.

A sham indeed. That’s before the Iran issue. Obama’s Iran deal is a pile of manure:

A fatwa that doesn’t exist, a wish list that no one signed, a resolution that contradicts the wish list, a protocol that no one has seen…

These are the elements with which President Obama claims he has concocted a strategy to stop Iran’s nuclear ambitions and stop it exporting murder and mayhem.

Supposedly issued by Iran’s “Supreme Guide” Ali Khamenei, the fatwa declares nuclear weapons as “illicit” (haram) in Islam.

Obama cites it as “proof” that Iran does not intend to build a bomb. The president has never said he has seen the fatwa, which, in any case, would have no legal or religious weight.

However, those who refer to the fatwa, including some mullahs, always credit Obama as the source of their information. In the 18th century, Mullah Sadra liked to say that “you will see only if you believe.” He has a disciple in Obama.

The wish list is the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), a 159-page tome issued in Vienna last July after two years of talks between an Iranian delegation and the so-called P5+1 group of big powers led by the US.

“This is neither an agreement nor a treaty,” writes Dr. Saberi Ansari, Iran’s legal advisor during the talks. “An agreement or a treaty is distinguished by the fact that its contents are binding on contracting parties. This is not the case with JCPOA.

For example, JCPOA envisages moves that ought to be made by the United Nations or the International Atomic Energy Agency. However, it is not in Iran’s or the P5+1’s gift to decide for the UN and the IAEA.”

What we have instead is a list of things that participants in the talks wish would happen.

However, the Iranian side does not feel bound by the wish list. It has not even been presented at the Council of Ministers headed by President Hassan Rouhani. Ministers have read about it in the press. More interestingly, there is no official Persian translation of the text.

So what did obama get in the deal?

Iran’s atomic-energy chief, Ali-Akbar Salehi, put it nicely when he said that “the only thing that Iran gave Obama was a promise not to do things we were not doing anyway, or did not wish to do or could not even do at present.”

The deal is so bad that even the left shreds it:

These latest developments undoubtedly confirm what conservatives and other pro-Israel activists have been arguing throughout this entire episode. They’re yet another reason why people who don’t like flawed GOP nominee Donald Trump will still have a hard time voting for Hillary Clinton, given her prominent role in helping usher in this flawed deal. They also tarnish President Obama’s legacy, despite his brag last week at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia that he’d “shut down Iran’s nuclear weapons program.”

The State Department officially denied any explicit link between the $400 million payment and the release of prisoners, that this happened entirely coincidentally, not as a tit-for-tat. But it’s baffling why this administration continues to place its blind faith in a theocratic, authoritarian regime that bankrolls terror the world over, from Hamas to Hezbollah to the murderous Assad regime.

“It’s time the State Department stop trusting Iran more than the U.S. Congress,” Michael Rubin, a foreign policy expert at the American Enterprise Institute, told Salon. “The problem isn’t simply the timing of the ransom payment. Rather, it is the fact that Obama and Kerry are acting like gamblers who believe they can win big with just one more throw of the dice, and are willing to sacrifice increasingly more to do so. There simply is no introspection. The whole premise of the Iran deal was that they could work with Iranian reformers and moderates to defeat Iran’s hardliners at home and abroad. They never understood that Supreme Leader Khamenei and President Rouhani were playing an elaborate game of good cop-bad cop.”

obama didn’t really care. All he ever sought was a trophy- a participation trophy– something for the mantle. An achievement to boast about, no matter what the reality. As he has done throughout his eight years in office, he depends on the stupidity of the American democrat voter. obama’s Iran deal has a bunch of secret side deals- at least three for certain. obama allows Iran to do its own nuclear site inspections.

Turns out there was a complete cave to Iran on that already in the works courtesy of Iran’s side deal with the UN. If you’re wondering how often a country suspected of covertly working on a bomb is allowed to report on its own facilities, without the IAEA conducting independent inspections, former UN inspector OIli Heinonen told the AP he’d never heard of such a thing in all his time at the agency. This capitulation, essentially putting Iran on the honor system, is totally unprecedented. Heinonen, incidentally, is also the guy who raised alarms last month when it came out that Iran’s deal with the U.S. would give them 24 days potentially to clean up a site where secret nuclear work is suspected before the UN is allowed entry. That’s more than enough time to cover your tracks, said Heinonen, if the site is small, as is likely to be the case with Iran’s attempts at cheating. In other words, we have one of the world’s foremost experts on nuclear weapons programs telling western media that the enforcement provisions of the deal are a sham.

Iran has warned Trump about making public the details of the agreement.

Secret side deals related to the nuclear agreement remain unclassified but have been stashed in a secure location on Capitol Hill, making it difficult for staffers and lawmakers to view them. Individuals seeking to view these documents must have security clearance and are barred from taking notes or speaking about what they see.

Multiple senior congressional sources familiar with the nature of the documents told the Free Beacon that lawmakers and the Trump administration would not be intimidated by Iranian threats.

Alaeddin Boroujerdi, a senior Iranian lawmaker and head of country’s foreign policy committee, warned the Trump administration against making these documents public in recent remarks.

“If Trump wants to publish confidential documents exchanged between Iran and the International Atomic Energy Agency, it will in fact constitute a violation of the agency’s obligations, because the agency has been committed not to make Iran’s confidential nuclear information and documents available to any country, including the U.S.,” Boroujerdi was quoted as saying in Iran’s state-run media.

Some of these documents surround side deals struck between Iran and the IAEA regarding the Islamic Republic’s ability to enrich uranium. They also include deals about how much information Iran must disclose to international inspectors about the country’s contested nuclear program.

And my favorite part:

As part of the nuclear deal, U.S. inspectors are not permitted to take part in the review of any Iranian sites.

obama has struggled mightily to keep a lid on just how bad the deal is:

Included in these documents are details of multiple, secret payments to Iran that totaled close to $2 billion. The money is believed to have been part of an incentive package aimed at securing the release last year of several American hostages in Iran.

None of this information is technically classified, yet it remains hidden from the American public and a large portion of Congress.

“The deal has only survived this long because the Obama administration gave Iran secret exemptions to cheat,” said one veteran congressional adviser familiar with the documents. “The Iranians know that if people found out about those exemptions, it would be obvious that the deal was always a bad, unsustainable deal, and they couldn’t blame Trump. That’s why they’re making up reasons why parts of the deal should be kept secret.”

I’ve written about how bad this deal is here. The problem is that this is only what we know. There is without question a lot more we don’t know and given obama’s dissembling, dishonesty and deceit over Syria the Iran deal should scare the sh*t out of you.

We already knew that the Iran agreement was nothing more than a open sore papered over to buy time until obama was out of office. What else is obama lying about?  obama could have signed over Fort Knox or the state of Hawaii to Iran for all we know.

DrJohn

DrJohn has been a health care professional for more than 30 years. In addition to clinical practice he has done extensive research and has published widely with over 70 original articles and abstracts in the peer-reviewed literature. DrJohn is well known in his field and has lectured on every continent except for Antarctica. He has been married to the same wonderful lady for over 30 years and has three kids- two sons, both of whom are attorneys and one daughter on her way into the field of education.

DrJohn was brought up with the concept that one can do well if one is prepared to work hard but nothing in life is guaranteed.

Except for liberals being foolish.