The Right Solution For Iran Is Not War

This is an excellent article. Must  read.

We are at a critical juncture in our time in history. The Iran nuclear deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), has entered now its third year.

As the Trump White House is pending its Iran policy there is increasing support for regime change. All the while the Iran appeasement camp are boosting their efforts of claiming any firm policy on Tehran will lead to war. The question is do the measures professed by this party truly prevent war?

When Iranian opposition National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) recently held its annual convention in Paris, with Trump “emissaries” such as former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich speaking powerfully of regime change in Iran. Former US ambassador to the UN John Bolton went as far as declaring the Iranian regime will not witness its 40^th anniversary in February 2019.

In response, Iran and its lobbies in the West, terrified of such a surge behind the NCRI as the sole alternative able to bring about true change in Iran, have not remained silent. Iran apologists are yet again seen resorting to the old tactic of warning about a new war in the Middle East.

For decades now pro-Iranian regime writers have cautioned against adopting a firm policy on Tehran, allowing the mullahs’ regime to plunge the entire Middle East into havoc.

As we speak Iraq, Syria and Yemen are in ruins thanks to Iran’s support of proxy elements fueling sectarian conflicts and deadly civil wars.

The war in Afghanistan has yet to finalize after 16 years, and reports continue of Iran supporting the Taliban and al-Qaeda in this country.

Lebanon has yet to witness political stability in decades as Iran continues to funnel millions of dollars and arms to its offspring, the Hezbollah, brought to life by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) back in 1982.

Many other Arab countries can follow suit after Kuwait expelled Iran’s ambassador and more than a dozen other “diplomats” from its soil based on espionage charges.

But of course, the Iran apologists conveniently consider such matters as irrelevant or at best second hand. These very Iran lobbyists are the actual warmongers as their efforts have provided Tehran the opportunity to bring upon utter devastation to all Middle East nations.

Pat Buchanan in a Townhall piece argues, “After Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen, would America and the world be well-served by a war with Iran that could explode into a Sunni-Shiite religious war across the Middle East?”

Neglected here is the passivity encouraged by such Iran-apologists has actually empowered Tehran. The end result has been Iran engulfing Iraq and Syria into a horrific abyss of Shiite militias massacring innocent Sunni civilians.

Former MEP Struan Stevenson sheds light on such an unfortunate phenomenon.

“800,000 people have been rendered homeless from Mosul alone, millions when you count the refugees who fled from Ramadi and Fallujah. Thousands of innocent Sunni civilians have been killed, and tens of thousands among them were injured,” he wrote in a recent Al Arabiya article.

There is no question that the 2003 Iraq war was a strategic mistake. Yet why do Iran-apologists, again conveniently, neglect another drastic error of Obama prematurely pulling all US troops out of Iraq in 2011? This left the fledgling state of Iraq at the hands of wolves, being Iran, its puppet, former Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki, and Shiite proxies and death squads.

We simply cannot deny the fact that al-Maliki in Iraq, Bashar al-Assad in Syria, Hezbollah in Lebanon, all supported financially and logistically by Iran, paved the path for the rise of ISIS. They massacred Syria’s Sunnis, parallel to Maliki’s crackdown of the Iraq’s Sunni minority. This allowed ISIS to spread, and first in Iraq and Syria, and thus throughout the Middle East, Europe and beyond.

The regime in Iran actually benefited extremely from the rise of ISIS to claim legitimate its involvement in Iraq and Syria through Shiite proxy groups.

Again, as Iran-apologists across the board in the US and Europe encouraged engagement and rapprochement with Tehran, climaxing unprecedentedly during Obama’s tenure, Iran’s mullahs continued their killing spree across the region.

Looking back at the past several years, one can dare to accuse these Iran-apologists of paving the path for Tehran to legitimize its horrific killing sprees, and causing a horrible number of deaths. Can we not accuse them of warmongering?

These Iranian lobbyists, including Trita Parsi, head of the so-called “National Iranian American Council”, raise the flag of war being bad for business, and thus cheering diplomacy to encourage business. Yet he neglects Iran’s own warmongering in the Middle East.

All said and done, with the Trump administration seriously weighing regime change as policy vis-à-vis Iran, the international community sees before it the opportunity to finally adopt the right policy on Iran.

Engagement has failed. Wars in the Middle East have been disastrous. We do not want to go down that road in regards to Iran. And there is no need.

The Iranian people and their organized opposition, the NCRI, are more than capable of toppling the mullahs’ regime in Tehran. This organization has everything in place and seek only the international community to recognize their struggle and end the disastrous Iran appeasement approach. A course correction vis-a-vis Iran policy regarding is needed, too, in order for the people of Iran and their opposition to take on the rest.

Source:The Right Solution For Iran Is Not War

Certifiably wrong about Iran’s compliance

It’s hard to believe, and much less to ‘certify’ that Iran is living up to its sworn obligations

You can look at these fotos and then judge

Via:The Iranian Express

Or to these fotos

Via:Iran Dominates in Iraq After U.S. ‘Handed the Country Over’

During President Trump’s campaign he said that Mr. Obama’s 2015 nuclear weapons deal with Iran was the “worst deal ever.” Although there are many diplomatic deals vying for that title, the deal engineered by Mr. Obama is at least one of the worst ever for two reasons.

First, it essentially guarantees that the world’s principal terrorist nation will obtain nuclear weapons either during the fifteen-year term of the deal (stealthily) or openly soon after it ends. Second, because it does precisely nothing to limit Iran’s development and production of ballistic missiles capable of delivering nuclear weapons.

The Trump administration has certified to Congress that Iran is in compliance with the deal (the “Joint Cooperative Plan of Action”) twice, first in April and again last week. Those certifications are required every 90 days by the “Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act” (INARA), the anti-constitutional law that permitted Mr. Obama the ability to claim Senate approval of the deal without senate ratification.

Mr. Trump reportedly considered telling Secretary of State Tillerson to not make the July certification but decided not to. It would have been far better if the president had blocked both certifications.

The problems that should have blocked the certifications are found within INARA’s terms or are directly derivative of them.

INARA required that within five days of reaching an agreement with Iran, the president shall send Congress, “the full details of the agreement, including all supporting materials and any classified annexes to the agreement.”

That was never done. The Senate’s duty to object to that failure, thereby killing the deal, was ignored.

Because of the Senate’s failure we don’t know what the so-called agreement actually provides. For almost two years it has been entirely clear that secret side agreements were made with Iran that the U.S. wasn’t allowed to see. At least one of them provides that Iran can self-inspect the Parchin nuclear site which is believed to be the center of the Iranian nuclear weapons program. (Unsurprisingly, the self-inspections tell the IAEA that all is just peachy at Parchin.)

In August 2015, Secretary of State John Kerry said that he hadn’t seen the side deal. His “negotiating deputy,” Wendy Sherman, said she’d seen a few pieces of paper but wasn’t allowed to keep them.

The most conclusive evidence of our ignorance was also published in 2015. Mr. Yukiya Amano, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN’s purblind nuclear “watchdog,” told members of congress that he was bound by secrecy and couldn’t divulge the agreement (agreements?) to them. We don’t even know what other side deals are being concealed from us.

In a 2015 interview Mr. Trump made clear that he wanted to renegotiate the deal, not cancel it. He said, “We have a horrible contract, but we do have a contract.” He added that he “loves” to buy bad contracts and make them good. Attorney General Sessions should tell the president that because we’ve never seen the secret side deal there is no “contract” between us and Iran. We’re not bound to any contract parts of which we’ve never seen.

Mr. Trump can’t renegotiate the deal because Iran — and the deal’s other signatories, Britain, France, China, Russia and Germany — refuse to do so. Because there are no inspections of Parchin, any certification that Iran is complying with its obligations under the agreement is purely fictitious. We cannot believe, far less can certify, that Iran is living up to its obligations under Mr. Obama’s deal.

Mr. Trump’s choices are limited to either revoking the deal or living with it. So far, he has chosen the latter course. He must know that is as untenable a choice as living under the threat of North Korea’s nuclear weapons.

Our national security requires the president to establish policy goals for Afghanistan, Iran, North Korea and for whichever other conflicts — cold or hot — threaten our nation’s vital interests. At this point, no such policies have been forthcoming from the president.

Mr. Trump has never established a goal for Afghanistan. Defense Secretary Mattis, who is drafting the Afghanistan strategy, said earlier that it would be ready in mid-July and more recently that it isn’t yet. Is the policy for Iran to live with its nascent nuclear threat? What does the end of “strategic patience” mean for our policy toward North Korea?

The president has made it clear that he won’t telegraph our strategies or tactics to the enemy, which is entirely correct. But the American people, and our allies, need to know enough about our policy goals to make the political decision to support them.

The longer the president waits, and the more political defeats he suffers, the more difficult it will be to convince them.

Mr. Obama was severely criticized, and rightly so, for his six-month delay in deciding a mini-surge of troops for Afghanistan. His belated announcement, which included a date-certain on which the troops would be withdrawn, was self-defeating.

The lesson for Mr. Trump is this. Making clear decisions, conveying them to Americans and our allies and acting upon them, is the only substitute for Mr. Obama’s dithering. And only revoking his “agreement” with Iran can lead to a solution to a highly dangerous problem.

• Jed Babbin served as a deputy undersecretary of defense in the George H.W. Bush administration. He is a senior fellow of the London Center for Policy Research and the author of five books including “In the Words of Our Enemies.”

Source:Certifiably wrong about Iran’s compliance