The Facts About the Iran Deal
Iran gets everything. We get nothing.
The memorandum of understanding or MOU of the first phase of the new Iran Deal contains 14 points. Of those 14 points, 5 of them (4, 6, 7, 10, 11) represent unilateral commitments being made by the United States to Iran including the suspension of a naval blockade, all sanctions, and $300 billion in financing, while only 1 (5) represents a commitment by Iran to end its blockade, not to the United States, but to regional Muslim countries with whom it will negotiate.
Two of the financial clauses benefiting Iran (10,11) that allow Iran access to its frozen funds and provide waivers for its oil exports are to be immediately activated after the MOU is signed. Two others (6,7) offering $300 billion in investment capital and an end to all sanctions are to be potentially given to Iran as part of a ‘final deal’ that is to be reached in 60 days or later. This in theory makes these two clauses contingent on some hypothetical Iranian nuclear deal.
Iran makes no unilateral commitments to the United States. It does not commit to ending its nuclear program. It does not promise to stop financing attacks by its Iraqi and Yemeni terrorist proxies against the United States which have killed multiple American military servicemembers well before the current conflict. Terrorism isn’t even mentioned in the MOU even though virtually all of Iran’s attacks on Americans have taken the form of proxy terrorist attacks worldwide.
The deal has the United States and Iran agreeing not to use military force, an area where we are strong and Iran is weak, with no mention of ending proxy terrorist attacks, an area where they are strong and we are weak, so that even the central multilateral commitment is heavily skewed to favor Iran, allowing its terrorists to operate, while our military stands down.
After multiple Iranian terrorist plots in the United States, including against President Trump and members of the Trump administration, the MOU does not even technically secure a promise not to carry out more attacks. The MOU only mentions an end to “military operations” or “use of force” that Iran can plausibly argue do not cover terror plots by its proxies. Nor do they cover Iran’s efforts to rig past presidential elections with hacking plots aimed at Trump officials although the second clause can technically be used to argue that would be a violation.
The only thing Iran commits to is opening up the Strait of Hormuz in exchange for immediate access to billions in frozen cash, waivers for oil exports and diplomatic protection from the United States for its Hezbollah proxies in Lebanon responsible for the torture, kidnapping and killing of hundreds of Americans, including 220 Marines in Beirut, with the eventual promise of an end to U.S. and UN sanctions and $300 billion in ‘investments’ to be promoted by us.
None of these are opinions; they are simple facts that anyone can read for themselves.
Iran gets every single thing it could want from this deal. The only thing we get from it is the reopening of the Hormuz Strait. And we don’t even get to negotiate the terms directly with Iran. And Iran has shown it will close the strait any time it likes to blackmail us.
The idea here is that Iran gets billions of dollars up front and the promise of $300 billion and an end to sanctions if it reaches a final deal with us. This is the kind of deal that makes sense to the businessmen who negotiated it, but is completely clueless about the beliefs and motivations of the Islamic terrorists who run Iran, as they were about the motivations of the Taliban.
But even from a business side, the negotiating strategy is as lopsided as anything Kerry did.
The MOU already spells out American concessions for the final deal, ($300 billion and an end to sanctions) while Iran does not offer any final deal concessions. It only “reiterates” that it will not develop nuclear weapons. J.D. Vance and proponents of the deal have already stated that Iran’s ballistic missile program, already the subject of sanctions, will be off the table in a final deal.
That means that Vance has already made a huge concession to Iran ahead of the final negotiations. And Iran has made no similar concessions which means that if we go by its past actions under Obama and Biden, it’s going to want even more concessions at the table.
Whatever one may think about a war with Iran, none of this is objectively good dealmaking.
The nuclear agreement in the final deal, as laid out in the MOU, will in theory deal with Iran’s stockpiled enriched nuclear material by ‘downblending’ it on site under the supervision of the UN’s IAEA nuclear agency. The IAEA has not proven to be especially credible and the ‘downblended’ material will presumably remain in Iran where it can be enriched again.
In the best case scenario, this resets the clock a bit, and the MOU leaves open the door to further Iranian enrichment (8) “the two parties also agreed to discuss the issue of enrichment and other mutually agreed matters related to the Islamic Republic of Iran’s nuclear needs.”
Iran has no ‘nuclear needs’. It’s an energy superpower. It wants nuclear weapons. Allowing it any nuclear capability opens the door to nuclear weapons and ‘dirty’ nuclear bombs.
And the deal is potentially even worse than we know.
Just as in the Obama Iran Deal, there are secret ‘side deals’ that J.D. Vance is calling ‘Gentleman’s Agreements’. These agreements between Iran’s terror regime and the administration are currently being kept secret from the American people. While it would be nice to trust the administration, it already lied to us that the leaked copy of the MOU that appeared in the media was not the actual agreement. Now we know that it was the same basic deal.
The MOU is a humiliating surrender to Iran, but the next step is a ‘final agreement’ that would be binding through the mechanism of a UN Security Council resolution. That means President Trump or any future administration would potentially be in violation of a UN resolution if hostilities resumed with Iran. There is no mention of such a final agreement however serving as a treaty to be ratified by the Senate. Just ratified by the United Nations.
That’s the same unconstitutional gimmick used by the Obama administration for its Iran Deal.
It’s pretty obvious why the Trump administration is doing this. President Trump became frustrated because the war was taking longer than expected and rising oil prices were wreaking havoc on the economy and on poll numbers ahead of the midterm elections. He once again listened to people who were giving him bad advice and Witkoff and Qatar got Iran its best deal.
J.D. Vance and the administration have put forward no argument for the deal on its merits, only accusing opponents of “misinformation” and demanding to know what their ideal of a better deal is. This argument is borrowed chapter and verse from the Obama sales pitch for the Iran Deal.
Now that the MOU has been signed, the administration will do its best to make it seem like a good thing, and Iran, as it has every time before, will take advantage of that to humiliate the administration and extract as much as possible from the negotiations while giving nothing.
Iran has now demonstrated that it can turn the flow of oil on or off and force the United States to its knees. Now it’s going to push to expand its regional hegemony. The first step is in the MOU (1), which calls for a “permanent end to the war on all fronts, including Lebanon”. The United States is not involved in a conflict in Lebanon, but Israel is, with Hezbollah terrorists. The first clause already allows Hezbollah to attack Israel, but demands that the United States stop Israel from striking back. This is a template intended to go beyond Israel, but across the entire region.
Iran’s Islamic terrorist proxies in Iraq, Yemen and anywhere else will be given a free hand to attack while the United States will be obligated to prevent its allies, Israel, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and others to sit back and take it lest the agreement and the negotiations be broken off.
The longer Iran stretches out the negotiations, the longer it can deploy its terrorist shield.
Iran will be able to take over much of the region and break up any American alliances because our allies will have a choice between fighting back, cutting a separate deal with Iran or breaking their ties with us. Much like the Cold War collapses under Truman, Nixon and Carter, the United States will end up betraying our allies and handing entire regions over to our enemies.
The Iranians have clearly studied that history and just as clearly, our negotiations haven’t.
There has been a lot of hysteria about the Iran Deal from both sides. That’s why it’s important to look at the basic facts of the memorandum of understanding and translate them into the real world. The answer isn’t to ‘trust the plan’, but to stop making deals with Islamic terrorists.
The Trump administration has done important work in cutting down on Islamic mass migration and cracking down on its networks in this country, but there is much still to be done, and the greatest tragedy is that despite vital clarity from President Trump on Islamic terrorism, his administration lacks anyone with an actual understanding of Islam and its motivations. Instead our diplomatic maneuvers continue to be handled by American businessmen like Steven Witkoff and Jared Kushner who have financial ties to the state sponsors of Islamic terrorism.
That’s bad news for America. And it’s bad news for the Trump administration which needs to clean out the useful idiots of Islam, instead of putting them in charge of our foreign policy.
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center’s Front Page Magazine.
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