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Ignoring the Professionals, the Trump Administration Puts Overdue Pressure on Iran and North Korea

Nov. 22 2017

On Monday, the White House announced its decision to designate North Korea as a sponsor of terrorism—a designation that had been removed in 2008. Also on Monday, the Treasury Department declared that it had discovered, and plans to punish, a sophisticated counterfeiting scheme run by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC); whatever sanctions it imposes in response will have been made possible by President Trump’s prior decision to consider the IRGC a terrorist group. Noah Rothman applauds these moves:

Pyongyang has exported conventional weapons and nuclear and missile technology to other U.S.-designated state sponsors of terrorism, such as Iran and Syria, and terrorist groups including Hamas and Hizballah. It helped to construct a nuclear reactor in Syria, which Israel thankfully destroyed just a few years before the region in which it was built fell into the hands of Islamic State. . . .

Since Trump has taken office, the administration has been busily restoring sanctions on the Iranian regime that were relieved as a result of the . . . nuclear deal. President Trump’s decision to punt the Iran deal back to Congress is likely to preserve it while avoiding responsibility for that outcome. Yet his administration’s outward determination to abrogate the agreement has allowed it the freedom to call balls and strikes when it comes to the Islamic Republic, even if that angers America’s “partners” in Tehran.

Take, for example, the U.S. Treasury Department’s most recent sanctions on Iran. . . . This is not the first time Iran has been implicated in currency counterfeiting. In 2010, U.S. military officials seized at least $4.3 million in counterfeit American currency in Iraq. . . . The sudden influx of false notes was believed to be part of a campaign by Iran to influence forthcoming elections in Iraq, which was apparently successful. Within days of those elections, three of the country’s four major political alliances sent delegations to Iran for political guidance. The head of Iraq’s secular, anti-Iranian bloc noted at the time that America’s silence was deafening. . . .

[D]eclaring North Korea and the IRGC supporters of terrorism is a decision that seems obvious only to those who are not steeped in granular diplomatic contrivances.

Read more at Commentary

More about: Donald Trump, Iran sanctions, North Korea, Politics & Current Affairs, Terrorism, U.S. Foreign policy

 

The Summary: 10/7/20

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.

Read more at Mosaic