Cash for the Revolutionary Guards The Nuclear Deal is a Financial Windfall for Iran’s Military Wing.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/cash-for-the-revolutionary-guards-1438814759
President Obama’s Iran deal has been losing support in the polls and on Capitol Hill, and so on Wednesday he tried to reason with his critics. “It’s those hardliners [in Iran] chanting ‘death to America’ who have been most opposed to the deal,” he said in a speech at American University. “They’re making common cause with the Republican Caucus.”
So Republicans in Congress equal Revolutionary Guards in Tehran. Nice. Name-calling and immoral equivalence are always the best way to win over skeptics.
In truth, Mr. Obama isn’t trying to persuade anyone. He’s trying to keep enough partisan Democratic support across the country so he can hold one-third of the House and Senate. That’s all he needs to implement his deal. This explains his other rhetorical tactic Wednesday, which was to equate opposition to his deal with a vote for war in Iraq in 2003 and a lust for war generally. He’s essentially banking on the Senate’s Elizabeth Warren wing to save him from what is building into a bipartisan majority repudiation of the deal.
***
This growing opposition flows from the accord itself, which looks worse the closer people inspect it. Take the deal’s financial windfall for Iran’s terrorist and military activities, which even Mr. Obama conceded Wednesday would benefit. The inflow from sanctions relief could approach $150 billion within 16 months. The President says most of the money will go to improve Iran’s economy, but this misjudges the regime’s priorities and how its economy works.
Consider the Revolutionary Guard Corps, or IRGC, which is the regime’s military and ideological spine and controls an estimated 20% of the Iranian economy. This includes perhaps half of all government-owned companies, such as construction firm Khatam Al-Anbia, which is involved in building everything from city metros to oil pipelines; the Telecommunication Company of Iran, where an IRGC-controlled company has a 51% stake; and thousands of smaller front companies.
“To do business in Iran, foreign companies need an Iranian partner, which for large-scale projects often means firms controlled by the IRGC,” Reuters’s Pariza Hafezi and Louis Charbonneau reported in July. That means the Revolutionary Guards will benefit from the one-time windfall when Iranian oil profits now held in escrow are released, and going forward as foreign companies race to get into the Iran market.
How will they spend the money? In April, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei gave the order that “all organizations, including the Ministry of Defense, the military and the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, should increase their military and defense preparedness and increase their combative and mental capabilities on a daily basis. This should be taken as an official order.” President Hassan Rouhani has followed orders by increasing the defense budget by 32.5% over last year.
It’s true that Iran’s military spending remains small by U.S. standards—officially about $17 billion this year. But Ayatollah Khamenei has already vowed that Iran will continue to supply its regional allies.
And how exactly is a group like Hezbollah worse off if its principal patron is better able to supply arms and money? That’s especially so since the deal also lifts the current U.N. embargo on the sale of conventional arms to Iran in five years, while Russia is already flouting the embargo by selling Tehran S-300 surface-to-air missiles.
Then there is the list of Iranian entities on which sanctions are to be lifted. That starts with the IRGC, including its air force and missile command. Sanctions are also lifted on the Qods (Jerusalem) Force, which currently props up the Assad regime in Syria and supplied Shiite militias in Iraq with the IEDs that killed hundreds of American GIs. As recently as 2011 the Qods Force was implicated in an attempt to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the U.S. by blowing up a restaurant in Washington, D.C.
Ahmad Vahidi, the former Iranian defense minister wanted by Interpol for his role in the 1994 bombing of a Jewish cultural center in Buenos Aires, is also being taken off the sanctions list. So is Tidewater Middle East Co., an IRGC-owned port operator sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury in 2011 because of its involvement in arms smuggling.
And if containing Iran’s regional intimidation is a U.S. priority, why remove sanctions from Iran’s Cruise Missile Industry Group? In 2006 Hezbollah punched a hole in an Israeli ship stationed off Lebanon using an Iranian-supplied cruise missile based on a Chinese design. Iran could repeat this against American ships in the Persian Gulf.
All of this is strange if the goal of the deal is strictly to contain Iran’s nuclear program, as Mr. Obama says it is. The details of the nuclear deal show that it also provides legal relief, and new financial resources and opportunities, for the instruments of Iran’s regional aggression. The deal sets Iran on the path to getting a nuclear weapon and in the meantime it gives Iran the means to create far more trouble in the Middle East. No wonder it’s losing public support.
Comments are closed.
