DEMS CAN’T STAY SOFT ON IRAN
Nuclear deal flawed by letting off terror group
When it comes to Iran’s fomenting of terror and its repression of Iranians, Democrats need to do more than express disgust with President Trump while staying silent on Iran’s human rights abuses themselves. Both are easy to do; neither addresses the serious problem the Iranian regime poses to the people of the Middle East.
We’ve learned, thanks to a recent POLITICO expose, that the Obama administration, in its determination to land a nuclear deal with Iran in order to tout a foreign policy achievement, blocked prosecutions of the Iranian-sponsored terrorist group Hezbollah, which was running a massive drug trafficking operation pouring cocaine onto American streets.
As one former Treasury official told Congress, “under the Obama administration (Hezbollah-related), investigations were tamped down for fear of rocking the boat with Iran and jeopardizing the nuclear deal.”
A former Defense Department analyst said: “This was a policy decision, it was a systematic decision.”
The expose, based on interviews with dozens of officials, is both stunning and unsurprising. In its painfully obvious zeal to get a deal with Iran signed, the Obama team engaged in a bare-knuckled campaign to deride those urging that tougher terms be imposed on the world’s foremost state sponsor of terrorism before sanctions were lifted and $150 billion in cash was handed over to it.
With thousands of Iranians now protesting the regime, long one of the planet’s worst human rights violators, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani yesterday reiterated that protesters would be harshly punished.
“Our nation will deal with this minority who chant slogans against the law and people’s wishes, and insult the sanctities and values of the revolution,” he warned. His government has killed at least a dozen citizens and arrested hundreds more in the past several days.
Democratic Party interest groups who loyally soft-pedaled the Iranian reality are once again demanding that the U.S. and the international community stay mute about Iranian abuses. The National Iranian American Council, which helped the Obama White House mock those pressing for a tougher deal with Iran, issued a particularly inane statement, calling upon the world to look the other way at the repression of Iranians.
“It is up to Iranians living in Iran to decide their country’s destiny,” the council declared. Where it is Iran’s young people pitted against the brutal, heavily-armed Iranian Revolutionary Guard, this is like urging that lambs be left alone to work things out with the slaughterhouse operators.
Democrats rightly say that Trump lacks the credibility to affect world opinion on this issue. But that is no excuse for Democrats to undermine their own credibility by taking a powder on Iran. Nothing is served by going soft on a regime so harmful to the Middle East and to its own people’s aspirations.