by Dick Morris
No issue cuts across all racial, class, gender, income, and ethnic lines more than terrorism. Obama’s inept response to terrorism and his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s failures make the Democrats extremely vulnerable on the issue. Obama’s strategy of dividing the electorate along race, gender, age, and ethnicity falls in the face of the terrorism issue. As random as the terror attacks have become, they reach everyone equally. People of all races, ages, and both genders are vulnerable. It is the transcendent issue of our times. We are in danger not because we are white or black, Anglo or Latino, men or women, gay or straight, young or old, but because we are Americans. But the terror threat is growing on both the macro and micro level. Even as ISIS shows the potential for awful destruction from lone wolves or small groups with rudimentary weapons, Iran speeds toward the development of nuclear weapons, impelled by both Obama’s and Hillary’s policies of appeasement.
Hillary Enables Iran
The horrible giveaway Obama negotiated with Iran will be one of the Republican Party’s best issues in 2016. Voters don’t trust Iran. They see Iran as still intent on backing and funding terrorism and focused on developing a nuclear weapon. They feel Obama’s deal is predicated on a level of trust in Iran’s government that they do not share and feel the procedures to verify it and detect cheating are inadequate. Few issues unite Americans more than their skepticism of Iran.
Rasmussen reported that, by a margin of 62 to 35, American voters do not think it is likely that Iran will “uphold its end of the deal that ends some economic sanctions on that country in exchange for cutbacks in the Iranian nuclear weapons program.” Indeed, 39% say it’s “not at all likely” that Iran will abide by its word.35
So in the Rasmussen poll, taken in December 2015, only the diehard Democratic Party base believes Iran will keep its word. A strong majority of Independents and almost all Republicans think Iran will cheat.
Hillary has tied herself to the Iran deal, giving it what the New York Times called her “strong endorsement.” As usual, she hedged, saying that it could only work as part of “a larger strategy toward Iran” that contained Tehran’s power in the region as sanctions are lifted.36
Since Iran has no intention of abiding by the deal, Hillary will need all the wiggle room she can get on the issue. But Trump can cut her off and pin her down by listing all the ways in which Iran has already violated the deal even before the ink was dry.
In the nine months after the deal was signed, Iran has conducted a series of ballistic missile tests that could be used to perfect nuclear weapons technology. Iran was barred from any ballistic missile development by UN resolution 1929, which read, “Iran shall not undertake any activity related to ballistic missiles capable of delivering nuclear weapons.”37 But the final deal with Iran on nuclear weapons watered down the prohibition into a mere request. The new UN resolution 2231, adopted July 20, 2015, superseded the old resolution 1929 and says, “Iran is called upon not to undertake any activity related to ballistic missiles designed to be capable of delivering nuclear weapons.”38 And even this resolution is slated to expire in eight years, leaving Iran free to do whatever it wants.
To celebrate its liberation from UN controls, in March 2016 Iran launched multiple 800 km and 2,000 km missiles from silos across the country. What did the United States do? Nothing. If the UN does anything, it will likely pass a toothless Security Council resolution critical of Iran. Meanwhile, the torrent of money released to Iran by the US government continues to flow unabated.
As Donald Trump said “we give them $150 billion. We get nothing.”39
Senators Mark Kirk (R-IL) and Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) demanded that the administration take concrete action to address Iran’s violations of the agreement. They said that the administration is “inviting” Iran to continue breaking international agreements. Obama claims that the issue of ballistic missiles is separate from the deal on nuclear weapons. He says one has nothing to do with the other. He implies that Iran can develop all the missiles it wants as long as it doesn’t build a bomb. But Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told Congress that “Iran is developing [intercontinental ballistic missile] capabilities and the sole purpose of an Iranian ICBM is to enable delivery of a nuclear weapon to the United States.”40
Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN), chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, also cited Iran’s violations. “Iran violates U.N. Security Council resolutions because it knows neither this administration nor the U.N. Security Council is likely to take any action,” Corker said in a statement. “Instead,” he added, “the administration remains paralyzed and responds to Iran’s violations with empty words of condemnation and concern.”41 “If we cannot respond to a clear violation of a U.N. Security Council resolution, I have no faith that the U.N. and the Obama administration will implement any form of snapback in response to Iranian violations of the nuclear agreement,” Corker said. The Obama administration, he added, “has the authority to penalize” Iran and its allies, but is refusing to exercise it.42
During the winter and spring of 2015–2016, in the run up to the elections, the Iranian violations received scant notice in American media. But during the fall campaign, Trump must hammer away at the violations, let Hillary have it, and demand action from Obama. Hillary, who endorsed the Iran deal after it was signed and urged Senate approval, must be held to account both for the flaws in the deal and for Iran’s violations of it.
And the money keeps on flowing to Iran. The Ayatollah has gotten $11.9 billion from the United States since the nuclear talks began. How much does that mean to Iran? Life and death.
Before the sanctions relief, Iran’s inflation rate was north of 30%, the government had to curtail subsidies for food and fuel, and political instability threatened. Now all is calm and all is good.
Iran’s GDP is $416 billion. Proportionately, getting $12 billion in cash is like America getting a grant of over $500 billion—enough to pay for all defense spending for a year or enough to pay for Social Security and Medicare. And the funds we are sending them are not mainly going to their domestic economy and certainly not to their impoverished people, but to Iranian terrorists bent on destroying us.
But the Iranians claim it is their money that the United States is giving back to them. Yes, it is Iranian money, but it was amassed by the Shah in the days before the Ayatollah took over. For the current regime, in power since 1978, it is an undeserved and unearned windfall.
Hillary the Hypocrite claims credit for the tough sanctions on Iran that forced it to the bargaining table. But the truth is the exact opposite. She, in fact, moved heaven and earth to block the sanctions from passing Congress. Hillary pretends that she and Congress worked hand-in-glove to get sanctions passed. “With the help of Congress,” she said, “the Obama administration imposed some of the most stringent crippling sanctions on top of the international ones . . . our goal was to put so much financial pressure on Iran’s leaders that they would have no choice but to come back to the negotiating table with a serious offer.”
She continued, “We went after Iran’s oil industry, banks, and weapons programs, enlisted insurance firms, shipping lines, energy companies, financial institutions and others to cut Iran off from global commerce.”43
All true. But she omits one part of the story: That she was against the sanctions and did her best to defeat them. Yet, as Ronald Reagan (and President John Adams) said, “Facts are stubborn things.”44
Republican Senator Mark Kirk (R-IL), who worked closely with former chairman of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee Bob Menendez (D-NJ), says that Hillary’s claim to have supported the Iran sanctions are “a blatant revision of history.” The senator added, “The fact is, the Obama administration has opposed [the effort to impose] sanctions against Iran led by Senator Menendez and me every step of the way, as was thoroughly documented at the time.”45
In late 2011, for example, Hillary sent a key aide, Undersecretary of State Wendy Sherman, to Capitol Hill to express th
e administration’s “strong opposition” to the amendment sponsored by Kirk and Menendez to sanction the Central Bank of Iran, one of the key measures that Congress imposed. Sherman argued that the action would “anger [our] allies by opening them up for punishment if they did not significantly reduce their imports of Iranian oil.”46
When the senators refused to back off their amendment, Hillary upped the ante by sending her number two at the State Department, Bill Burns, to an “emergency” meeting with top senators to try to kill the amendment. He and Hillary failed and the Senate passed the bill 100–0. Commenting on the battle over the amendment, Menendez told Hillary and Obama, “At your request we engaged in an effort to come to a bipartisan agreement that I believe is fair and balanced. And now you come here and vitiate that agreement. . . . You should have said [that you] want no amendment.”47
Menendez’s successor as Foreign Relations chairman, Senator Bob Croker (R-TN), saw Hillary’s and Obama’s attempts to take credit for the sanctions as a kind of backhanded compliment. “I take comments from administration officials saying they were so involved in this as a compliment. It was Congress who pushed this on a bipartisan basis,” said Corker. “Let’s face it. You saw the public pushback from the administration. People can say what they wish, but there’s no way we would be where we are today without Congress’s actions.”48
Hillary’s opposition to Iran sanctions goes back to 2009 when she and Obama worked to kill an amendment by Kirk and Democrat Evan Bayh (D-IN) to impose sanctions on Iranian exports of refined petroleum. Rolled into a subsequent omnibus sanctions bill, it passed—over Hillary’s objections—by 99–0 in the Senate and 408–8 in the House.
The most effective of the various sanctions imposed on Iran was the bill to bar Iranian financial institutions, including its Central Bank, from doing business with the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), the Brussels-based global financial clearinghouse. This sanction made it virtually impossible for Iran to do any kind of business internationally.
The Wall Street Journal reported that “the administration was afraid that the SWIFT-related sanctions would cause too much disruption to the system and unnerve allies. Lawmakers said the sanctions were needed to close a huge loophole through which Iran was laundering money.”49
Mark Dubowitz, the executive director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, put it best: “The overwhelming success of Iran sanctions is certainly motivating many folks to claim credit. The reality is that there is no doubt that the toughest sanctions were imposed by Congress over the objections of the administration.”50
After these sanctions forced Iran—on its knees—to enter negotiations, the administration agreed (and Hillary supported) a deal that gave Iran everything it ever wanted. And on top of the giveaway deal, the administration has since showered Iran with other concessions that even go beyond the scope of those it won in the negotiations. All Iran has to do is whisper that it is somewhat unhappy with something and Obama is right there offering more goodies. Almost any scrutiny of its terms, whether superficial or detailed, reveals its glaring defects. It is hard to conceive of a worse deal for the United States, Israel, or the fate of the world.
Defects of the Deal
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the Iran deal “a historic mistake” and said that it “reduces the pressure on Iran without receiving anything tangible in return, and the Iranians who laughed all the way to the bank are themselves saying that this deal has saved them.”51
We need to use the Iran deal as a key campaign issue. To do so, we have all got to understand why the deal is terrible. We have to be able to argue it out with our undecided friends, point by point. The key things to stress are discussed below.
Iran was wilting under the impact of American and international sanctions. Originally, these sanctions targeted the nuclear program, but over the years had expanded to hit every aspect of Iran’s economy starting with its banking system. Eighty percent of Iran’s government revenue comes from its sale of oil and gas to the rest of the world. The United States has long boycotted Iranian oil, but under the most recent round of sanctions—the ones that brought Iran to its knees—the European Union joined the boycott. At the peak of the sanctions, nobody in the United States or the European Union could either buy Iranian oil or insure their tankers. At the same time, the United States enacted legislation to punish countries that continued to do business with Iran, sharply limiting their ability to operate in the United States.
Driven by sanctions, inflation officially reached 22%, but most believe it had soared even higher. The International Affairs Review of the Elliott School at George Washington University wrote that “in one week alone, the price of chicken rose 30 percent and the price of vegetables almost 100 percent.” It noted that prices became “unstable” and that household budgets were “being stretched thinner and thinner, and people [saw] the value of their savings quickly disappear.”52
The government was forced to end its subsidy of food staples, electricity, water, and gas. Unemployment reached 35%. Factories and businesses laid off workers because they couldn’t get raw materials. The Iranian rial lost half its value and Iranians were increasingly demanding US dollars in their commercial transactions. The black market thrived.
Then the United States and the European Union took its foot off the throat of Iran and agreed to lift the sanctions under the deal. National Public Radio reported as follows: “$100 billion: That’s roughly how much the US Treasury Department says Iran stands to recover once sanctions are lifted under the new nuclear deal. The money comes from Iranian oil sales and has been piling up in some international banks over the past few years.”53
The money was accumulating because the Iranians were able to skirt the sanctions and sell at least some of their oil on the global markets. But they couldn’t get their hands on the cash the oil brought in. It was frozen in overseas banks.
Mark Dubowitz explained, “Those [mostly Asian] countries were buyers of Iranian oil. But they agreed to hold the funds in escrow until the sanctions are lifted. In other words, Iran sold them the oil but couldn’t move the cash back home.”54 Dubowitz warns that all of the $100 billion could end up funding Hezbollah or other terrorist organizations.
Now the pressure on Iran is off. Subsidies can again flow. Inflation will now be tamed. All momentum for regime change is dissipated. And the cash bonanza could be higher. The Foreign Policy Review estimates that the number is “north of $120 billion with an additional $20 billion per year in oil revenues, making the deal worth $420 billion over 15 years.”55 Not only is this torrent of cash being used to fund terrorism from Yemen to Lebanon to the West Bank to Iraq to Libya to Afghanistan to Pakistan, but it also keeps the Iranian regime afloat and in power.
By contrast, the United States has given Israel $148 billion in total military and economic aid in the 68 years since 1948, a sum dwarfed by the cash payout our worst global enemy has just received at the hands of President Obama.
Did Obama get the best deal he could? Donald Trump, for one, says absolutely not. He proclaimed that he would have doubled or tripled the sanctions when Iran proved obstinate at the bargaining table.
Now Obama—without a peep of protest from Hillary—is going even further in rewarding Iran with financial goodies beyond the scope of what was promised in the deal. The administration is telling foreign governments and banks that they can “start using the dollar in some instances to facilitate business with Iran.”56
The AP was told the new rules “would permit offshore financial institutions to access dollars for foreign currency trades in support of legitimate business with Iran, a practice that is currently illegal. Several restrictions would apply, but such a license would reverse a ban that has been in place for several years and one the administration had vowed to maintain while defending last year’s nuclear deal to skeptical U.S. lawmakers and the public.”57
The more voters understand what
a sweet deal Obama has given the Iranians, the angrier they will get. Hillary cannot avoid being caught in the crossfire. Her endorsement of the deal is clear and unequivocal. She will try to cloak her backing for its terms in anti-Iranian rhetoric. She has even vowed to go to war with Iran if they violate the deal. But Iran does not have to violate anything. Keeping to the terms of the deal will allow Iran to get the money to do anything it wants.
Nor does the treaty require that Iran give up its goal of developing nuclear weapons. The deal is only for 15 years. By 2030, all bets are off and Iran can go nuclear without fear of consequence. As Blaise Misztal, head of the national security program at the Bipartisan Policy Center, put it, “This isn’t a deal that prevents a nuclear Iran. It’s a deal that prevents a nuclear Iran for 15 years.”58
“All Iran has to do is take the patience pathway to a nuclear weapon,” said Mark Dubowitz, executive director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.59 Even within the 15-year window while the deal is in effect, there is little in it to constrain Iranian nuclear ambitions. As Iran’s atomic-energy chief, Ali Akbar Salehi, said, “The only thing that Iran gave Obama was a promise not to do things we were not doing anyway, or did not wish to do or could not even do at present.”60
The deal permits Iran to continue enriching uranium and producing plutonium, although at lower grades. Iran would keep about one-third of its 19,000 centrifuges capable of separating explosive U-235 from uranium ore. For 15 years, Iran promises to refine uranium to no more than 5% enrichment—the level needed for nuclear power plants—and agrees to limit its enriched-uranium stockpile to 300 kilograms—3% of its stores before the deal. But will Iran keep the deal?
