Resorting to peace talks after Trump’s bombing ultimatum was ludicrous
In the space of 48 hours President Trump swung from demanding Iran’s “unconditional surrender” or bunker bombing to delegating peace negotiations with Iran. With hindsight it had to be a smokescreen. Yet everyone fell for it.
It wasn’t the art of the deal but the art of duping the foe. And after the dirty Presidential games that marked Obama’s 2015 negotiations in Lausanne and Biden’s 2020 retry in Vienna, Trump has restored respect for super-power play.
The two appeasing colluding Democrat Presidents have a lot to answer for. Notably, what they cost Israel. There can be no disputing that they spawned outright war between the Jewish state and caliphate fanatics who’d progressed to the very cusp of Holocaust 2.
Geneva may have been luckier venue. Don’t count on it. The same scared European powers would have been skylarking at the table with terrorists in suits who’d fall back on their double trickery: a facade of negotiating while sprinting to the nuclear finishing line. Contrary to Tulsi Gabbard that Iran had not been up to mischief, a CIA director was adamant that Tehran was “very close to nuclear weapons” and that if Ayatollah Khomeini is killed and/or if the US strikes the Fordo plant, it could prompt a breakout to produce the Bomb.
Of all murky lunacies, redoing two failed nuclear talks with a wicked regime is the most comic, the most idiotic, the most perilous.
Apparently diabolical mischief is inherent in diplomats and Presidents engaging Iran in nuclear talks. There were portents when Obama did his Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), bringing in the European powers which Trump has now done, though he’s left out Russia and China. Proponents of Obama’s deal talked clap-trap by gaslighting the world that the JCPOA would prevent a revival of Iran’s nuclear capability and thereby reduce the prospects of conflict between it and regional rivals, not least Israel.
Well, well.
At the triumphant close to his chase after the Holy Grail, President Obama waxed lyrical to Tom Friedman of the New York Times. The interview was titled, “Obama Makes His Case on Iran Nuclear Deal”, and making it, the cock-a-hoop president pledged that, “It is a better outcome for America, Israel and our Arab allies than any alternative on the table”.
It was the table around which delegates neglected even to sign a deal that anyway, Obama himself conceded, was non-binding. But who cared.
That agreement was reached by give and take. America gave and Iran took. Its smirking plenipotentiaries got what they came for: billions’ worth of sanctions relief at the cost of mere nuisance value for their progress towards nuclear status.
Straitened economically and financially, the Islamist ideologues depended on a deal for securing their dictatorial power, regional dominance and global threat. They however did not have to be super canny to grasp that Obama would cut a deal no matter what. The way he’d acted as Tehran’s leading defender, cut corners and demeaned resistors – AIPAC the Israel lobby suffered a disempowering defeat – acute Mullahs grasped how deeply Obama was invested in bringing them in from the cold. Factor in a Europe with no stomach and a Russia and China with no scruples, and you had terrorists in suits waiting for their guaranteed payoff.
They got it, without having to exercise two deal breaking demands: (1) Hands off our raucous Holocaust threats to eliminate Israel, and (2) Hands off our global network of terror. Had this couplet been tabled, Iran’s foreign minister would have led his team out the door and back home – to make the Bomb. So Obama said.
Employing this woeful pretext he gave the Mullahs $150 billion to spend on what they liked. Detractors still think that the quid pro-quo was no more crooked or complex than cash bribes. When President Trump 01 denigrated the deal as the worst ever made, perhaps even he was kept from the dark truth behind Obama’s longed for legacy deal. The fact is that his pet project was enabled by the darkest of dark give-and-takes.
Which were? One transaction required letting Tehran get away with mass murder in Buenos Aries. A second involved US officials putting a spoke in the wheel of Argentina’s conveniently compromised rule of law. In a third transaction commodities were traded between the governments of Argentina and Iran. A fourth required a state prosecutor to be assassinated before he could bring the different criminals involved in the previous transactions to book.
All in all, the rotten saga was expunged as Tehran’s reward for being good enough to camp in Lausanne to negotiate a deal. So it wasn’t only money that changed hands to allow Obama to finally gush over a non-binding and unsigned agreement. It was Jewish blood – by the skip load.
How so?
In downtown Buenos Aires a low office building, locked down like Fort Knox, testifies to a multifarious infamy rare even in diplomacy annals. On a black billboard stuck alongside it you can make out eighty-five names painted in white. As to building’s name, Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina (AMIA) it became synonymous with, ‘Terrorist Atrocity’.
When a Renault truck pulled up at the entrance and detonated its payload on July 18, 1994, it ushered in days of horror and decades of evil.
Iran had masterminded the bombing while Hezbollah executed it. Eighty five died under the rubble and three hundred were pulled out badly injured. There’d been a trial run two years earlier. In identical fashion a few blocks away, a suicide bomber blew up a vehicle packed with explosives at the Israeli Embassy. Twenty nine died and two hundred were pulled from the rubble.
Admittedly, to hunt down terrorists is simple to promise but difficult to do. You have to: (1) identify them; (2) go after them; (3) attack or apprehend them. Even then diplomacy may shove a foot in the door. There can be strong motives for not making terrorists pay. The AMIA atrocity was a perfect exemplar. The Obama administration, to get Iran to sit around a table and go through the motions of negotiating, made it so that the masterminds behind the bombings would not get crime and punishment but crime and reward.
There followed a monumental investigation into the AMIA bombing. It made Argentinean Alberto Nisman, a government prosecutor, into a world celebrity. By 2006 the Jewish man had indicted seven members of Iran’s government, including a former President and Foreign Minister. He then did one better: Nisman secured international arrest warrants for five of the seven masterminds, thus locking them into Iran.
Enter Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, the President of Argentine, an Eva Peron in her beauty and blinding ambition. Doing a hideous volte face, she bartered the rule of law for commodities: Iranian oil for scuttling Nisman’s decade long case. For its part of the deal Tehran bought Argentine grain and had its crimes against humanity expunged. International trade with mass murder thrown in.
Utterly resolute, Nisman compiled a public docket a million-pages thick. He also compiled a secret docket of 300 pages, against President de Kirschner and her cronies. They were accused of inventing Tehran’s innocence in order “to pursue commercial, political and geopolitical interests.” Thus it was that a vixen and a bunch of terrorists with a price on their heads were exchanged for barrels of oil and sacks of grain.
What exchange did Obama’s evasive nuclear deal entail? Western diplomatic sources disclosed that his administration had twisted the arms of Argentine leaders to end Nisman’s investigation. It would be the Iranians’ reward for sitting down to negotiations in Lausanne. US officials met on different occasions with their Argentine counterparts. A source close to the country’s leadership explained:
“One of the first demands by Iran to the Obama administration was that Argentine be pressed to drop arrest warrants. Within months, the meeting was followed up with a higher level one where Argentine leaders were asked to lay off. They eventually complied.”
So it happened that international terrorists escaped the law and, with Obama’s bribe, were free and flush to blast more Jews, Allah willing, to kingdom come.
But Alberto Nisman’s moment had arrived. On January 14, 2015 he publicly accused President Kirchner and her Foreign Minister of engaging in a criminal conspiracy to bury the AMIA case. “The order to execute the crime came directly and personally from the President of the Nation,” the docket stated.
Nisman was summoned to testify before the Argentine Congress. He feared for his life, he told friends, but was determined to see the case through. Days before he appeared before Congress he texted: “On Monday I am going in strong with evidence!” He failed to survive that long. The night before his date with destiny Nisman got a bullet to the head in his bathroom. In the trashcan police recovered a legal document that cleared the way for Kirchner’s arrest.
Who ordered the Buenos Aries bombings, and why? Iran’s ‘Committee for Special Operations’ ordered them, to punish the Argentine government for – wait for it – opting out of a nuclear accord. But what did Jewish targets have to do with the diplomatic fallout? Nothing – Tehran’s policy is that when it decides to get even with a government the local Jewish community will bear the brunt.
The Nazi regime of our time plots genocide from Tehran, not from Berlin. Six million Jews – that number again ––present juicier pickings now that they are not spread around Europe but conveniently crowded into Israel. And the goal of wiping it off the map with nuclear bombs, contrary to Obama’s convenient delusion, does override all other considerations.
President Trump 01 had this combustible genie securely bottled until an impish President entered the Oval Office and popped the cork. Bomb-crazed Mullahs poured out, cackling over their new lease of life and freakish luck.
And so Tehran had no need to behave differently as regards: (a) developing nuclear capability and (b) global terrorism. Its red lines, unlike those of appeasing presidents, were real.
President Trump 02 would take no such nonsense. Or so Israel thought. Trump revived nuclear talks. He demanded time from Netanyahu for them. Netanyahu had long promised Israelis that he would never allow Iran to get nuclear capability – the pillar of his career. Therefore he did not give his greatest ally the time he wanted. On Friday June 13 Israel attacked the head of the snake. A biblical justification, verily: the attack on 6/13 equals the 613 obligations that the Old Testament requires the nation of Israel to observe.
Trump immediately distanced himself. Part of his reason was to pre-empt Iran from
attacking US assets in the Middle East. Another part was the vain hope of keeping the
nuclear negotiations alive. Out of power Trump had called the Obama deal “the worst deal
ever negotiated.” Back in power his Special Envoy Witkoff waved a draft deal not terribly
different.
To muddy the waters further Trump said that he liked the idea – wait for it – of Vladimir Putin acting as mediator between Jerusalem and Tehran. He like Putin wanted that the war should end.
What must the Mullahs now be thinking? While the ‘Big Satan’ engaged in mixed messaging with Europe the prevaricator and Putin the guarantor, vulnerable cowards sheltering in bunkers may try to activate ‘sleeper cells’, this time not in Argentina but in Europe and America. Trump offering them a two-week lifeline made no sense.
Concerning the premature stopping of war, I’m reminded of a deeply complex episode in the bible involving King Saul of Israel and the prophet Samuel. It recounts how the king dug his own grave, so to speak by departing from the battle plan communicated by God via the prophet. The plan was simple: annihilate Amalek as a nation. Do not spare one human or even one animal. Show no mercy. Amalek a warring people, was Israel’s what we would now call, existential enemy.
King Saul was Israel’s Commander in Chief. And disregarding the plan, he spared both livestock and the King of Amalek. He took Agag captive, and a more consequential folly has never been committed.
How did the callous Agag thank Saul for the one night he live in captivity? He made a woman pregnant. And the descendants were Haman and Hitler. One plotted a Holocaust in the Persian Empire and the other carried one out in Europe.
Peacemaking when fighting a mortal enemy can be the deadliest weapon in the enemy’s arsenal. The international community exploited it brilliantly. Biden, Obama, the UN and a whole spectrum of humanists blackmailed Israel to attack Hamas with pity.
There may be a lesson in this for opponents of Trump taking the bull by the horns and obliterating the nuclear sites. Don’t let the avatars of isolationism and humanitarianism wield both the gavel of judgment and the axe of punishment.