An Awful Deal Gets More Awful Yet

You might have forgotten about that awful deal that President Barack Obama struck last year with Iran’s apocalyptic suicide cult of a government over its nuclear weapons program, as Donald J. Trump hasn’t “tweeted” anything about it lately, but along with all the other things to worry about it continues to get more awful by the day.

Iran conducted yet another inter-continental ballistic missile test yesterday, launching a couple of Koranic-named rockets inscribed with “Israel should be wiped off the earth,” but we are assured this is no big deal. While the administration’s spokesmen will state with requisite diplomacy that the tests are “provocative,” they quickly add that such acts do not violate the terms of their deal, which seems to us to prove how very awful that deal is. The International Atomic Energy Agency won’t say that Iran is in violation of any international agreements, then quickly adds that the side agreements they agreed to with both the United States and Iran forbid them from revealing any Iranian violations of whatever was more-or-less agreed upon but not actually signed by anybody, which to us seems to make the more-or-less deal seem even more awful yet. Throw in that $150 billion that Iran is getting out out the deal, and the current Secretary of State’s under-oath admission that some of it’s going into Iran’s ongoing terrorist networks, and his complaint during the last round of missile tests that “they’re not supposed to be doing that,” and one shudders to think how very apocalyptically this might all turn out.

The deal was supposed to be Obama’s foreign policy legacy, just as his Obamacare legislation was supposed to be what he would be remembered for on the domestic side, and to his and the country’s and the entire world’s misfortune both suppositions will likely prove true. We were promised that the deal would verifiably prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons or the inter-continental ballistic missiles that make them especially dangerous and would quell that nation’s religious supremacist bellicosity, just as we were promised that everyone would have health coverage and everyone’s health care costs would go down by an average of $2,500 a year, but instead Iran seems to be building inter-continental missiles that are really only useful delivering nuclear warheads for some reason or another that the IAEA can’t comment on and the “death to America” rhetoric has lately seemed ramped up and the potential consequences make a couple-grand-and-a-half seem insignificant and the prospects of health care for everyone remote. As we contemplate our sorry choices for a successor to Obama, it is worth remembering how very awful he has been.

Even the sorry choices we choose from are likely to do better, as former First Lady and Senator and Secretary of State and corrupt foundation-scammer Hillary Clinton is arguing for renewed sanctions and can plausibly point to current Secretary of State John Kerry as proof that she’s only the second-worst Secretary of State ever, and rival self-described socialist and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders spent some time on a Stalinist kibbutz in Israel and might have some reluctance to let it be wiped off the earth, and of course the Republicans are taking a stronger stand, although the front-runner has lately been talking about neutrality toward Israel and seems to regard the whole Middle East as another real-estate deal where Israel might wind up the poor widow with the house where he wants to build a parking lot for his casino. More hopefully, Iran itself might yet save us from this awful deal.

The Iranian government has lately been gloating that it never did sign anything with the Great Satan, by which they don’t mean just Obama, but the rest of us as well, and that if the United States considers tests of inter-continental missiles named for Koranic verses and inscribed with the slogan “Israel should be wiped off the earth” so much as “provocative” they might just walk away. The Obama administration would likely go running after them with further concessions to make the deal even more awful, if possible, but if the Iranians play it out long enough for a long-shot scenario to develop on our awful political scene there might be some hope.

— Bud Norman

The Worst Deal Ever Gets Even Worse

Several weeks ago we reached the conclusion that the nuclear accord the Obama administration has reached with Iran is the worst deal ever struck in the history of diplomacy, and since then it looks even worse. There have been revelations of contingent side deals between the International Atomic Energy Agency and Iran that the administration has signed on to without reading, constant taunts by the Iranians about how they have defeated the western powers and are now free to continue their sponsorship of international terror and pursue nuclear weaponry, and proof that the administration is going headlong into this disastrous deal despite the opposition of a majority of the American public and its elected officials.

The existence of the two side deals was discovered by our very own Kansas’ fourth congressional Rep. Mike Pompeo during a fact-finding mission in Vienna, although he he wasn’t able to learn what the side deals say, just that the administration has apparently agreed to them even though it was also unable to learn what was involved, and given how very awful the known facts of the deal are we’re going to assume the worst about the unknown. In the highly unlikely event that the deals ultimately prove more or less benign there’s still the worrisome fact that the administration is signing off on them without notifying Congress, which strikes us as pretty darned unconstitutional even by the degraded standards of the moment, and the relative lack of attention being paid to this alarming development is an an alarming development in itself.

Then there’s all that gloating by apocalyptic suicide cult running Iran about how it’s nuclear programs and international sponsorship of more low-tech terrorism and general global trouble-making will continue unabated with the blessings of the Americans and their equally gullible western partners. One of the “tweets” by Iran’s “supreme leader” featured a illustration of President Barack Obama committing suicide along with text about predicting the futility of western resistance to Iran’s ambitions of global dominance, which is certainly more extreme than anything the “Tea Party” or any domestic opponents of the administration have ever dared. Even Secretary of State of John Kerry, whose enthusiasm for anti-American barbarism dates all the way back to this days as a hippie protestor of the Vietnam War, admits that he’s “disturbed” by such imagery and language. He’s not so disturbed that he’ll reconsider the disastrous deal he’s made, of course, but it’s a telling admission nonetheless.

Given that this is supposed to be a representative democracy there’s also something troubling about the fact that all the disastrous known deal and the possibly even worse unknown deals are all proceeding despite the fact that a clear majority of the country seems to know better. There are polls that ask the country if they support a deal that would prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons in exchange for lifting the economic sanctions against that country, with the predictably supportive response, but even those reveal that most Americans somehow understand that this particular deal won’t achieve that that response. There’s perhaps still a slight chance that Israel and the Sunni Arab countries and the western powers within reach of the inter-contentinental ballistic systems that Iran is free to develop under the proposed agreement will somehow survive this awful agreement, but it’s far less likely that our constitutional system of representative democracy will be unscathed.

— Bud Norman

Giving Peace Yet Another Chance

The theocratic nutcases who run Iran are boasting that the world powers have surrendered to their will with the newly announced agreement regarding their nuclear weapons program, and it seems they have a point.

A “Joint Plan of Action” announced by the Obama administration and its European negotiating partners allows Iran to keep its centrifuges running, leaves it with enough enriched uranium to build several bombs, entrusts enforcement of the few restrictions that are included to the watchful eyes of the same Nobel Prize-winning nitwits at the United Nations’ International Atomic Energy Agency who have been enabling Iranian nuclear ambitions for the past decade or so, and ends the economic sanctions that brought Iran to the negotiating table in the first place. The Iranians claim there is a further secret agreement that is even more to their liking, and the country’s president has been gloating about it on Twitter — “tweeting” apparently being permissible within fundamentalist Islam — while one of its generals has bragged to the press that it’s all due to the world’s fear of Iran’s military might.

Although the White House has denied any secret agreement it has also been suspiciously secretive about the details of what has been agreed to, and what the president has publicly said about the matter sounds considerably less cocky. In remarks to the press the president noted the agreement provides “time and space” to reach yet another agreement, that he can still decide not to agree to it and go back to the sanctions that led to the agreement, that congress shouldn’t re-impose sanctions, and that “What we want to do is give diplomacy a chance, and give peace a chance.”

It is never a good omen when a president of the United States is chanting old hippie slogans, but it is especially worrisome in response to the martial chest-thumping of theocratic nutcases intent on acquiring nuclear weapons. There is still a chance that Congress might scuttle the deal by continuing sanctions, as even some Democrats are unimpressed with the plan, and we hope they will do so despite the White House warnings that it would provoke a war. Allowing an apocalyptic suicide cult to set off a nuclear arms race in a traditionally bellicose region gripped by ancient and irrational hatreds cannot end well, and doing so for the sake of giving peace a chance makes no sense.

— Bud Norman