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Finally, the U.S. Has a Serious Plan for Opposing Iran

Oct. 16 2017

On Friday, the White House released a document outlining a new strategy for dealing with the Islamic Republic; the president also announced that he would not certify the nuclear deal by the October 15 deadline. By declining to certify, Trump has not jettisoned the agreement—known formally as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)—but simply given Congress the chance to renew sanctions. Amir Taheri comments:

[The new document] abandons the distinction that Barack Obama and John Kerry tried to make between Tehran’s backing for outright terrorist groups and its support of the so-called “militant” ones such as the Lebanese branch of Hizballah and the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood (i.e., Hamas). Without openly saying so, Obama implied that some of the “militant” groups financed and armed by Iran may not be as bad as [others] Tehran supported. President Trump rejects that illusion. . . .

[Furthermore,] the new strategy offers a broader vision of relations with Iran beyond the narrow issue of the nuclear deal, which . . . is presented as no more than a part of a larger jigsaw puzzle. The puzzle also includes “gross violations of human rights” and “the unjust detention of American citizens and other foreigners on spurious charges.” In other words, Tehran must understand that taking foreign hostages is no longer risk-free. . . .

[But President Trump] is not setting himself directly against the JCPOA as such. Instead, he points to Iran’s repeated violation of its pledges, as most recently testified to by the International Atomic Energy Agency’s director, Yukio Amano, with regard to inspection of certain military sites. Nor could Europeans ignore the fact that Iran’s testing and deploying of medium- and long-range missiles violates the terms of UN Security Council Resolution 2231, which is often cited to give some legal aura to the JCPOA. . . .

Trump’s text [also] makes it hard for the leadership in Tehran to devise a strategy to counter it. Had he renounced the JCPOA in a formal way, Iran’s leaders could have cast themselves as victims of “imperialist bullying” and deployed the Europeans . . . to fight in their corner. Now they cannot do that because all that Trump is demanding is a stricter application of the measures that the EU and others say they mean to defend.

That leaves Tehran with the choice of either unilaterally denouncing the JCPOA, for example by claiming that it cannot allow unrestricted inspection of “suspect sites” in its territory, or trying to open a dialogue with the U.S. through the EU or even regional mediation.

Read more at Asharq al-Awsat

More about: Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Iran nuclear program, Iran sanctions, Politics & Current Affairs, Terrorism

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