Tuesday, May 08, 2018

Trump nixes the Iran deal

Bret Stephens makes a lot of good points here: "A Courageous Trump Call on a Lousy Iran Deal."  It starts with the fact that this was not a treaty with any binding legal force and (at the time) it was widely unpopular with Americans:
The Obama administration refused to submit the deal to Congress as a treaty, knowing it would never get two-thirds of the Senate to go along. Just 21 percent of Americans approved of the deal at the time it went through, against 49 percent who did not, according to a Pew poll. The agreement “passed” on the strength of a 42-vote Democratic filibuster, against bipartisan, majority opposition.
But Obama and Horseface Kerry wanted their foreign policy "victory" so they were ready to ship pallets of cash to Tehran so that Iran could continue to sponsor terrorism, launch ballistic missiles, and wait out the clock to start up their nuclear program:
The goal is to put Iran’s rulers to a fundamental choice. They can opt to have a functioning economy, free of sanctions and open to investment, at the price of permanently, verifiably and irreversibly forgoing a nuclear option and abandoning their support for terrorists. Or they can pursue their nuclear ambitions at the cost of economic ruin and possible war. But they are no longer entitled to Barack Obama’s sweetheart deal of getting sanctions lifted first, retaining their nuclear options for later, and sponsoring terrorism throughout.
Good.

Flashback: Remember this?  "DOJ objected to $400 million payment to Iran, was overruled by State Department."  Because it was an obvious ransom payment. 

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Boeing just lost $19.6 billion in completed deals with Iran, as its export license will be revoked. But hey, workers can always use their severance checks to buy stock in Airbus and make it a win-win! And they'll always have wonderful memories of that great speech Trump gave at Boeing in February 2017, promising to protect their jobs.

Eric said...

Boeing was expecting this: "In fact, Boeing had been preparing to put the brakes on the Iran sales even before Tuesday's announcement."
http://money.cnn.com/2018/05/08/news/companies/boeing-airbus-iran-sanctions/index.html