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September 2017

Norway’s Bewildering Election by Bruce Bawer

Norway is the happy beneficiary of North Sea oil; yet for decades, oil profits have piled up a government fund while Norwegians have paid the highest gasoline prices in the world.

For years, Statistics Norway, the government agency charged with producing reliable data on every imaginable social and economic metric, has refused to make public certain “sensitive” information relating to Norway’s Muslim population, such as the actual numbers of immigrants entering the country through “family reunification.”

Is there any hope that a second Solberg government including FrP will accomplish any more in the way of curbing immigration than the first Solberg government did? At the moment, there seems little reason for hope.

Those of us who are concerned about Norway’s rapid Islamization took great hope from the 2013 parliamentary election. What mattered was not that it resulted in the formation of a right-wing coalition government. What mattered was that the coalition government, for the first time ever, included the Progress Party (FrP).

From its founding in 1973, FrP was an outlier among Norway’s major parties, of which there many. A quick survey: The Labor Party (Ap), the most powerful party during the postwar era, is the home of the cultural establishment; LO, Norway’s equivalent of America’s federation of trade unions, the AFL-CIO, is essentially a branch of Ap, and NRK, the government-owned broadcast corporation, is often described by critics as the voice of the Labor Party.

The other left-wing parties are the Socialist Left (SV) and Red parties, both of which are basically Communist, and the eco-alarmist Greens (MdG). The “bourgeois,” or supposedly non-socialist, parties include the Conservatives (H), for business people; the Christian People’s Party (KrF), for devout Christians; the Center Party (S), for farmers; and the Liberals (V). This division between socialist and non-socialist is something of a fiction: pretty much all of these parties support high taxes, big government, and the welfare state. Norway is the happy beneficiary of North Sea oil; yet for decades, oil profits have piled up a government fund while Norwegians have paid the highest gasoline prices in the world.

FrP, however, has always been different. It is the country’s closest thing to a classical liberal or libertarian party. It believes in individual liberty, the free market, low taxes, small government; it is strongly pro-American and pro-Israel; and it has long warned against the dangers of Muslim mass immigration. For all of these reasons, it has been routinely demonized by other parties and by the media, which depicted it, with breathtaking mendacity, as a gang of bigots, fascists, and right-wing extremists.

For a long time, the other parties vowed never to allow FrP into a government coalition or to work with it in any meaningful way. But after Carl I. Hagen, the firebrand who ran the party from 1978 to 2006, handed the reins to Siv Jensen, she strove to moderate the party’s image and woo other party leaders. As a result, after the 2013 election, the Conservatives invited FrP to form a coalition government, with support from the Liberals and KrF (the latter of which still refused to be a formal part of any government including FrP).

Those of us who had been wringing our hands over Muslim mass immigration cheered FrP’s rise to power. We braced for dramatic change in immigration and integration policy – among other things.

MARK STEYN: ON BENGHAZI- THE DISHONORED DEAD

In Sir Henry Wotton’s famous formulation, an ambassador is a man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country. In the case of Susan Rice, a UN ambassador is a broad sent to lie to her country for the good of her man — President Obama. Happily, it worked. Nine months after going on five Sunday talk-shows and pinning Benghazi on some unseen YouTube video, Miss Rice was promoted to National Security Advisor. The Administration’s designated fall-guy, the director of that unseen video, was thrown in jail for a year, and now lives in a homeless shelter.

My own view of Benghazi has been consistent since my column of September 14th 2012, three days after the attack and two days before Susan Rice peddled to the nation an agreed story she and the President and the Secretary of State knew was utterly false. Unlike her September 16th TV appearances, my September 14th column still holds up:

As I say, I’m inclined to be generous, and put some of this down to the natural torpor and ineptitude of government. But Hillary Clinton and General Martin Dempsey are guilty of something worse, in the secretary of state’s weirdly obsessive remarks about an obscure film supposedly disrespectful of Mohammed and the chairman of the joint chiefs’ telephone call to a private citizen asking him if he could please ease up on the old Islamophobia.

Forget the free-speech arguments. In this case, as Secretary Clinton and General Dempsey well know, the film has even less to do with anything than did the Danish cartoons or the schoolteacher’s teddy bear or any of the other innumerable grievances of Islam. The 400-strong assault force in Benghazi showed up with RPGs and mortars: That’s not a spontaneous movie protest; that’s an act of war, and better planned and executed than the dying superpower’s response to it. Secretary Clinton and General Dempsey are, to put it mildly, misleading the American people when they suggest otherwise.

One can understand why they might do this, given the fiasco in Libya. The men who organized this attack knew the ambassador would be at the consulate in Benghazi rather than at the embassy in Tripoli. How did that happen? They knew when he had been moved from the consulate to a “safe house,” and switched their attentions accordingly. How did that happen? The United States government lost track of its ambassador for ten hours. How did that happen? Perhaps, when they’ve investigated Mitt Romney’s press release for another three or four weeks, the court eunuchs of the American media might like to look into some of these fascinating questions, instead of leaving the only interesting reporting on an American story to the foreign press.

But the court eunuchs never did take an interest, and it would be foolish to expect them to now. Nevertheless, if Washington had a healthy media culture, the Ben Rhodes email outlining the Administration’s four goals for Susan Rice’s telly marathon would be devastating:

*To convey that the United States is doing everything that we can to protect our people and facilities abroad;

*To underscore that these protests are rooted in an Internet video, and not a broader failure of policy;

*To show that we will be resolute in bringing people who harm Americans to justice, and standing steadfast through these protests;

*To reinforce the President and Administration’s strength and steadiness in dealing with difficult challenges.

All four “goals” are bunk, but the second was an explicit lie.

Who was this colossus of Rhodes? He’s not part of the State Department or the “intelligence community”; Ben Rhodes was a political guy in the White House. And it was the political guys who called the shots, rather than the diplomats or spooks or military or anyone else who knew what actually happened that night in the Libyan town of Benghazi, as opposed to the stage-set “Benghazi” the White House constructed and dressed with lies. Rhodes & Co “politicized” Benghazi because that’s all these fellows know how to do:

To ‘politicize’ means ‘to give a political character to.’ It is a reductive term, capturing the peculiarly shrunken horizons of politics: ‘Gee, they nuked Israel. D’you think that will hurt us in Florida?’ So media outlets fret that Benghazi could be ‘bad’ for Obama — by which they mean he might be hitting the six-figure lecture circuit four years ahead of schedule. But for Chris Stevens, Sean Smith, Glen Doherty, and Tyrone Woods, it’s real bad. They’re dead, over, gonesville. Given that Obama and Secretary Clinton refer to Stevens pneumatically as ‘Chris,’ as if they’ve known him since third grade, why would they dishonor the sacrifice of their close personal friend by peddling an utterly false narrative as to why he died? You want ‘politicization’? Secretary Clinton linked the YouTube video to the murder of her colleagues even as the four caskets lay alongside her at Andrews Air Force Base — even though she had known for days that it had nothing to do with it. It’s weird enough that politicians now give campaign speeches to returning coffins. But to conscript your ‘friend”s corpse as a straight man for some third-rate electoral opportunism is surely as shriveled and worthless as “politicization” gets.

In the vice-presidential debate, asked why the White House spent weeks falsely blaming it on the video, Joe Biden took time off between big toothy smirks to reply: ‘Because that was exactly what we were told by the intelligence community.’ That too is false.

That’s from my column of October 11th 2012, after an extraordinary month in which the three most senior figures grew ever more brazen in their dishonesty, President Obama shoring up his fake narrative by warning the UN General Assembly that the future must not belong to those who slander the Prophet of Islam. The future’s in no danger of belonging to him: that guy’s in a California jail cell. The night of September 11th in Benghazi didn’t belong to him, either – until Obama and Clinton decided he deserved the credit.

At 8:30 p.m., when Ambassador Stevens strolled outside the gate and bid his Turkish guest good night, the streets were calm and quiet. At 9:40 p.m., an armed assault on the compound began, well planned and executed by men not only armed with mortars but capable of firing them to lethal purpose — a rare combination among the excitable mobs of the Middle East. There was no demonstration against an Islamophobic movie that just got a little out of hand. Indeed, there was no movie protest at all. Instead, a U.S. consulate was destroyed and four of its personnel were murdered in one of the most sophisticated military attacks ever launched at a diplomatic facility.

This was confirmed by testimony to Congress a few days ago, although you could have read as much in my column of four weeks ago. Nevertheless, for most of those four weeks, the president of the United States, the secretary of state, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, and others have persistently attributed the Benghazi debacle to an obscure YouTube video — even though they knew that the two events had nothing to do with each other by no later than the crack of dawn Eastern time on September 12, by which point the consulate’s survivors had landed safely in Tripoli.

Imran Awan Had a Secret Server that Was Connected to the House Democratic Caucus By Debra Heine

A clearer picture is coming into focus on the Democrat IT scandal that may help explain why Democrats have been so reluctant to condemn the Awans or help the police with the investigation. It also might explain why former DNC chair Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz has been so jumpy lately.

New information about a massive cybersecurity breach, gleaned from a senior House official with direct knowledge of the investigation, implicates the former chair of the House Democratic Caucus, then-Rep. Xavier Becerra, who is now the attorney general of California and a rising star in Democrat politics.

This scandal isn’t about bank fraud, folks.

Kudos to Luke Rosiak of the Daily Caller for chasing down this story, even as the Democrat media complex either poo-pooed or ignored the growing scandal. As Ace of Spades noted, at some point the legacy media is going to have the explain to their audiences why they didn’t report on this major story all year long.

Via the Daily Caller:

A secret server is behind law enforcement’s decision to ban a former IT aide to Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz from the House network.

Now-indicted former congressional IT aide Imran Awan allegedly routed data from numerous House Democrats to a secret server. Police grew suspicious and requested a copy of the server early this year, but they were provided with an elaborate falsified image designed to hide the massive violations. The falsified image is what ultimately triggered their ban from the House network Feb. 2, according to a senior House official with direct knowledge of the investigation.

The secret server was connected to the House Democratic Caucus, an organization chaired by then-Rep. Xavier Becerra. Police informed Becerra that the server was the subject of an investigation and requested a copy of it. Authorities considered the false image they received to be interference in a criminal investigation, the senior official said.

Data was also backed up to Dropbox in huge quantities, the official said. Congressional offices are prohibited from using Dropbox, so an unofficial account was used, meaning Awan could have still had access to the data even though he was banned from the congressional network.

Awan had access to all emails and office computer files of 45 members of Congress who are listed below. Fear among members that Awan could release embarrassing information if they cooperated with prosecutors could explain why the Democrats have refused to acknowledge the cybersecurity breach publicly or criticize the suspects.

According to the DCNF’s source, the Awans’ use of Dropbox went well beyond casual use. They were “funneling of huge quantities of data offsite where it could not be taken back by House authorities.”

Wasserman-Schultz kept Imran Awan on even after he was banned from using official computers, and only fired him after he was arrested at the airport back in July as he was trying to abscond to Pakistan. In May, she threatened the capitol police chief with “consequences” if he didn’t return her confiscated laptop.

Imran Awan’s wife, Hina Alvi, who has been in Pakistan for months, has struck a deal with federal prosecutors, agreeing to return to the U.S. and face charges. Alvi was also an IT staffer for House Democrats. CONTINUE AT SITE

Chelsea Manning Disinvited as Harvard Fellow After Protest from CIA Officials By Bridget Johnson

The dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School announced in a late-night statement that Chelsea Manning was disinvited as a visiting fellow after former Acting CIA Director Mike Morell quit in protest.

“Senior leaders have stated publicly that the leaks by Ms. Manning put the lives of U.S. soldiers at risk,” Morrell wrote in a letter to dean Douglas Elmendorf. “The Kennedy School’s decision will assist Ms. Manning in her long-standing effort to legitimize the criminal path that she took to prominence, an attempt that may encourage others to leak classified information as well.”

Morell said he had “an obligation to my conscience — and I believe to the country — to stand up against any efforts to justify leaks of sensitive national security information.”

While serving in the Army, Manning passed nearly 750,000 classified or sensitive documents to WikiLeaks, and in August 2013 was sentenced to 35 years in prison for violations of the Espionage Act and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, as well as other charges. President Obama commuted her sentence and she was released on May 17.

On Wednesday, the Institute of Politics at Harvard Kennedy School announced Manning would be one of several visiting fellows. Morell announced his resignation as a non-resident senior fellow at the Belfer Center the next day. The former CIA chief stressed in his letter that he supported Manning’s rights as a transgender American and her right to “publicly discuss the circumstances that surrounded her crimes,” but said it was his right and duty “to argue that the school’s decision is wholly inappropriate and to protest it by resigning from the Kennedy School — in order to make the fundamental point that leaking classified information is disgraceful and damaging to our nation.”

In a midnight statement, Elmendorf said Manning was invited “because the Kennedy School’s longstanding approach to visiting speakers is to invite some people who have significantly influenced events in the world even if they do not share our values and even if their actions or words are abhorrent to some members of our community.”

Here’s What Really Happened to Hillary Voters found her unappealing, and they rejected Bernie’s ideology too. By Kimberley A. Strassel

Republicans have issues, but Democrats have them too. Witness the two individuals who dominated this week’s news—and who conveniently represent the left’s most crippling problems.

Hillary Clinton is again everywhere, touting her new memoir and adding to the list of who and what are to blame for her loss: Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Barack Obama, James Comey, Jill Stein, Vladimir Putin, Julian Assange, Anthony Weiner, sexism, misogyny, the New York Times , lazy women, liberal activists and the “godforsaken Electoral College.” All she’s missing is climate change.

Hillary’s take on “What Happened” has unsurprisingly unleashed another round of analysis about her mistakes—Wisconsin, deplorables, email. These sorts of detailed postmortems of failed campaigns are popular, but they tend to obscure the bigger reasons for failure. In this case: The Democratic Party saddled itself with an ethically compromised and joyless candidate, because it had nobody else.

Hillary spent eight years planning her first presidential bid, and the next eight warning Democrats not to get in the way of her second. The Clinton Foundation was erected to serve as bank and Rolodex, and to enable the Clintons to retain their grip over the party. And that party was committed to a Clinton coronation, right up to Mr. Sanders’s cheeky assault.

Mr. Obama aided Mrs. Clinton’s ambitions by decimating his party. By the time Barack Obama finished his eight years in office, his party held 65 fewer House seats, 14 fewer governorships and controlled 30 fewer state legislatures. It had turned a once-filibuster-proof Senate majority into minority status. The big-tent Democratic coalition shriveled to a coastal, progressive minority, wiping out a generation of Democratic politicians and most of the party’s political diversity.

And so the party nominated perhaps the only Democrat in the country who could rival Donald Trump in unpopularity—and beat him in untrustworthiness. Mr. Sanders refused to go after Mrs. Clinton on her ethical baggage, even though it was her biggest weakness and despite how glaringly obvious was the risk that her foundation and server scandals would hobble a general-election campaign. The parties gave the country a choice between two unpopular people, and the country disliked her more. The real question is how Democrats rebuild a party whose senior leaders in the House boast an average age of 72 and which has almost no young, experienced up-and-comers.

Which brings us to Mr. Sanders, the symbol of Democrats’ other big problem. This week the senator, flanked by about one-third of Senate Democrats, released his “Medicare for All” proposal to nationalize health care. These are the ascendant voices in the party. Yet there are few of them, because their agenda is highly unpopular. CONTINUE AT SITE

Trump’s Dreamer Dealing The deportation lobby is a minority in the U.S. and the GOP.

Anything can happen with Donald Trump, and it usually does, as some of his ardent followers are discovering to their shock as the President negotiates with Democratic leaders on immigration. Mr. Trump has been known to change his mind, and in this case that’s for the good as his bipartisan dealing to legalize young adult immigrants brought here as children is in the best interests of the country and his Presidency.

“Does anybody really want to throw out good, educated and accomplished young people who have jobs, some serving in the military? Really!” Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter Thursday morning. That excellent rhetorical question followed his dinner Wednesday night with Democratic leaders Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, who announced afterward that they had a deal with Mr. Trump to legalize the Dreamers, as the young adults are known.

Mr. Trump has been less definitive, saying Thursday morning in Washington that he and the two Democrats were “fairly close” to an agreement that would also include “massive border security.” He said his wall at the Mexican border “will come later,” though later in Florida he said “we’ll only do it if we get extreme security, not only surveillance but everything that goes with surveillance. If there’s not a wall, we’re doing nothing.”

Who knows how this will turn out, but we hope Mr. Trump cuts that deal with the Democrats with few security strings attached. The benefits would be many.

Congress would codify in law a policy that Barack Obama imposed illegally by executive fiat. Mr. Trump would solve the most politically emotive immigration problem, which is the fate of these young adults who committed no crime in coming here. Some 700,000 people could keep contributing to American society without fear of deportation.

Mr. Trump would also notch a political success on immigration that eluded George W. Bush and Mr. Obama. He would show, as he promised in the campaign, that he can get things done. Not a bad day’s work.

The Campus Left vs. the Mentally Ill Berkeley offers counseling to those upset by a guest speaker. Other students have genuine problems. By Clay Routledge

Conservative commentator Ben Shapiro is scheduled to speak Thursday at the University of California, Berkeley, and school officials are prepared. A campuswide announcement promised “support and counseling services for students, staff and faculty” who feel Mr. Shapiro’s presence threatens their “sense of safety and belonging.”

You don’t have to be a psychologist to see the absurdity of an elite American university offering mental-health services in response to a talk no one is required to attend. But such political theatrics aren’t objectionable only for free-speech reasons. A minority of students on college campuses legitimately struggle with mental illness, and they deserve support. They are collateral damage of psychology’s abuse for ideological purposes.

For one, the misappropriation of psychology contributes to the snowflake narrative. It is hard for people to appreciate that there are students who genuinely suffer from mental illness when they see so many academics, administrators and student activists making a pretense of psychological trauma in their quest to purge the campus of any ideas or experiences that do not conform to leftist orthodoxy.

The students we need to worry about usually aren’t the ones demanding safe spaces, obsessing over so-called microaggressions, or claiming words are violence. Many of those grappling with real mental illness do not seek or receive any mental-health services. That includes those at risk of suicide, the second leading cause of death among Americans between 15 and 34. One large national survey found that less than 20% of suicidal students were receiving treatment.

Mental-health professionals working on college campuses have noted an increased demand for services from students. There are reasons to debate the extent to which we are experiencing an increase in the prevalence of mental illness, as opposed to a decrease in college students’ preparedness for normal life stressors. Do young adults need mental-health services or more experience independently navigating the world? This issue is complex, and experts have diverse opinions.

Researchers have, however, identified reasons to be concerned about the psychological health of teenagers and young adults. In her new book, “iGen,” social psychologist Jean Twenge argues that we may be on the brink of a major mental-health crisis among the generation born between 1995 and 2012, a crisis she links to smartphones and social media. This has nothing to do with campus speakers. Berkeley students aren’t suddenly going to develop psychopathology because Mr. Shapiro is making a brief appearance on campus.

Regardless of whether we are facing a true increase in serious mental health problems among college students, limited resources will always be a reality. Imagine how hard it would be for those with physical illnesses if we encouraged people to go to the doctor every time something made them uneasy. Promoting counseling services in response to a campus speaker is like suggesting to people at the gym that they should call 911 because exercise is uncomfortable. It’s supposed to be—that is how exercise works. Likewise, psychological growth requires exercising our mental muscles, and students are perfectly capable of doing so.

There is no compelling reason to believe that young people are so mentally fragile that they should feel personally threatened by exposure to provocative ideas. Our species would have never made it very far if that were the case. In fact, democracy would have been impossible as would have most societal advancements that require us to negotiate emotionally-charged issues. CONTINUE AT SITE

Chelsea Manning Named Visiting Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics by Conor Beck (huh??????)

From my e-pal Charlite

The John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University has named convicted felon and transgender activist Chelsea Manning as a visiting fellow at its Institute of Politics for the 2017-18 academic year.

Harvard’s announcement of its incoming class of visiting fellows at the Institute of Politics celebrates Manning’s inclusion as the program’s “first transgender fellow.”

The Kennedy School describes Manning in its press release as “a Washington, D.C. based network security expert and former U.S. Army intelligence analyst.”

“She speaks on the social, technological, and economic ramifications of Artificial Intelligence through her op-ed columns for the Guardian and the New York Times,” the announcement says. “As a trans woman, she advocates for queer and transgender rights as @xychelsea on Twitter.”

The description also mentions Manning’s imprisonment for leaking troves of classified U.S. documents, before former President Barack Obama commuted most of her 35-year sentence in January.

“Following her court martial conviction in 2013 for releasing confidential military and State Department documents, President Obama commuted her 35-year sentence, citing it as ‘disproportionate’ to the penalties faced by other whistleblowers,” Harvard’s announcement says. “She served seven years in prison.”

Manning’s Twitter page, which Harvard specifically referenced, currently has her pinned tweet as a call to “abolish the presidency.”

Chelsea E. Manning

✔ @xychelsea

abolish the presidency 😎🌈💕 #WeGotThis

Other visiting fellows for this academic year include former White House press secretary Sean Spicer; Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign manager, Robby Mook; and Kansas City, Mo. Mayor Sylvester “Sly” James, Jr. (D.).

The Institute of Politics’ acting director, Bill Delahunt, celebrated the diversity of viewpoints represented in the new class of fellows.

“Broadening the range and depth of opportunity for students to hear from and engage with experts, leaders, and policy-shapers is a cornerstone of the Institute of Politics. We welcome the breadth of thought-provoking viewpoints on race, gender, politics, and the media,” Delahunt said.

Rewarding Terrorists in the Baltic Countries By Bruce Bawer

In Sweden, it’s old news: as Aftenposten reported a couple of years ago, the politicians in charge of local affairs in Stockholm had decided to offer returning ISIS members instant jobs, welfare handouts, and free homes.

This, mind you, at a time when one-fifth of young Swedes can’t find work, when schools, hospitals, and retirement homes are in decline because immigrants are taking too big a cut of the funds appropriated for social services, and when it’s virtually impossible to find a flat in the Swedish capital.

Erik Slottner, an opposition politician, called the new policy “a reward for criminals.” But Ewa Larsson, a Green Party member who’s in charge of social services in Stockholm, answered that charge by making a distinction between addressing criminal acts – which, she maintained, is the job of the police – and providing social services, which is her wheelhouse.

Fair enough. But why should returning members of ISIS be entitled to move to the front of the line when it comes to collecting free stuff? The closest Larsson came to offering a justification for the policy was to say this: “No human being is born as an extremist.” There it is again: the nobody’s-really-guilty Nordic mentality that will spell the death of Sweden.

Larsson isn’t alone. Last year, Anna Sjöstrand, a local official in Lund, Sweden, told a reporter that the question of how to treat returning ISIS members needs to be “undramatized” so that public officials can examine it in a practical way. She framed the issue as follows: “Here’s Kalle who has this problem and what does Kalle need in order to feel good and to remove himself from that environment?”

OK, let’s break that down. “Kalle” (not “Muhammed”?) has a “problem” (he’s butchered any number of men, women, and children in the name of Allah, but is feeling a little worn out and has decided to look into other lifestyle options). What he needs now, above all, is to escape that “environment” (ISIS as abusive family?) and “feel good.”

And what does Kalle need? Sjöstrand explains: “It could be a residential set-up, financial help, education – it’s about investigating and looking at what the individual requires in order to quit [ISIS].” In short, it’s all about what “Kalle” needs.

The Iran Deal’s Backers Are Getting Desperate Don’t be fooled by their misleading arguments for remaining a party to this terrible agreement. By Fred Fleitz

Supporters of the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, otherwise known as the JCPOA, are worried. They know President Trump is on the brink of refusing to certify the agreement to Congress next month and withdrawing from it. To stop this from happening, they have come up with a series of desperate and deceptive arguments to convince the president to stick with the deal, despite its deep flaws.

Fortunately, there is a far better and more responsible alternative: a compelling strategy drafted by Ambassador John Bolton to withdraw the United States from the JCPOA and implement a more coherent Iran policy.

Mr. Trump was right when he said during the presidential campaign that the JCPOA is the worst international agreement ever negotiated, since it allows Iran to continue its nuclear-weapons program by permitting it to enrich uranium, operate and develop advanced uranium centrifuges, and run a heavy-water reactor. The limited restrictions that the deal imposes on Iran’s enrichment program will expire in eight years. And in the meantime, its inspection provisions will remain wholly inadequate.

Although the JCPOA did not require Iran to halt its belligerent and destabilizing behavior, President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry repeatedly claimed it would lead to an improvement in that behavior. This has not happened. Instead, Iran has become an even more belligerent and destabilizing force since the deal was announced in 2015. It stepped up its ballistic-missile program. It upped its support of terrorism and sent troops into Syria. And it increased its aggression in the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea, as the Houthi rebels — its proxy in Yemen — continued to fire missiles at U.S. and gulf-state ships.

As Trump considers withdrawing from the JCPOA, its backers are promoting several dubious arguments in an effort to keep it in place. These include:

1. Argument: The IAEA says Iran is in compliance with the JCPOA. Although it is true that a September 1, 2017, IAEA report did not cite any Iranian violations of the deal, and IAEA director general Yukiya Amano has said Iran is meeting its JCPOA commitments, according to an analysis by the Institute for Science and International Security, “the [IAEA] report is so sparse in details that one cannot conclude that Iran is fully complying with the JCPOA.” The Institute also notes that, “nowhere in the report does the IAEA state that Iran is fully compliant.”

In addition, Iran refuses to allow IAEA inspectors access to what it deems to be military sites, a major violation. After Amano suggested in a speech on Monday that the IAEA could obtain access to Iranian military sites if necessary, an Iranian official made clear that that was not the case, stating that “Mr. Amano, his agents and no other foreigners have the right to inspect our military sites, because these sites are among off-limit sites for any foreigner and those affiliated with them.”

2. Argument: Iranian violations of the JCPOA are minor and “not material.” Iran-deal backers have tried to downplay Iranian violations, including those spelled out in a July 11 letter from Senators Tom Cotton (R., Ark.), Ted Cruz (R., Texas), David Perdue (R., Ga.), and Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, as minor and “not material breaches.” The truth is that these violations are significant. The four senators also noted that German intelligence reported covert cheating by Iran in 2016 and 2017.

But even if one accepts the arguments of JCPOA supporters who dismiss Iranian violations, the compliance issue is a red herring, since Tehran can advance its nuclear-weapons program by continuing its uranium-enrichment and heavy-water-reactor operations without running afoul of the deal. Moreover, when most of the deal’s restrictions expire in eight years, Iran will be able to massively expand its nuclear program with the international community’s blessing.

3. Argument: President Trump should decertify the JCPOA to Congress but remain in the agreement so we can spend several years trying to fix it. Worried that a U.S. withdrawal from the nuclear deal will anger European leaders, some JCPOA supporters have proposed that the president state he is not certifying the agreement to Congress on the October 15 deadline, but the U.S. will remain in the deal to start negotiations to amend it. After the president’s “decertification,” JCPOA supporters contend Congress could re-impose U.S. sanctions lifted under the deal.

This is a dishonest argument for several reasons. First, it makes no sense to remain in an agreement that the president has determined is not in America’s national interests. Second, the idea that the U.S. should remain a party to the JCPOA to fix it later is actually a clever argument to keep us in the deal for good, since Iran’s ruling mullahs have made it clear they will never agree to amend it. And third, JCPOA supporters know that if President Trump decertifies the deal without withdrawing from it, Senate Democrats will use the filibuster to block the restoration of any sanctions lifted by the agreement.