RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/11/time-support-iranian-protestors-bruce-thornton/

While we continue to waste our attention on the carnival attraction known as the impeachment hearings, protests against the mullahcracy have engulfed major cities in Iran. Rather than repeat Barack Obama’s appeasing silence in 2009, and his ignoring explicit calls for support from the beacon of liberty, we need to be bold in our support for the protestors, and even bolder in actions that will back up our words.

The precipitating event that has intensified long-running protests has been a 50% increase in fuel prices. This blow to everyday people’s budgets comes a year after President Trump withdrew the US from the Iran deal, and imposed tougher sanctions on the regime, reducing revenues from the sale of oil. But it’s the actions of the mullahs that are to blame. They took Obama’s bribes to sign the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, and have squandered them on developing missiles, spinning centrifuges, and financing jihadists in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and Iraq under the noses of American troops.

For Iran, this geopolitical jihadist adventurism is nothing new. Indeed, for 40 years it has been at the heart of Iranian foreign policy. The architect of the revolution, the Ayatollah Khomeini, proclaimed, “We shall export our revolution to the whole world. Until the cry ‘There is no god but Allah’ resounds over the whole world, there will be struggle,” i.e. jihad.  His successors have been true to that goal, one dismissed by our foreign policy savants who blame Israel or the sins of colonialism instead of recognizing this 14-century-long religious motive documented in Islamic law, doctrine, and long record of invasion, conquest, colonizing, slaving, raiding, and occupation. True to Khomeini’s words, for forty years the mullahs have shed the blood of Americans with impunity.

The JCPOA that opened the road to Iranian nukes has been a disaster, an appeasement whose consequences still may, if Iran obtains nuclear weapons, rival that of the French and British at the Munich conference in 1938. Trump’s withdrawal from that malign agreement was an important first step. But NATO allies like France and Germany, whom the devotees of the “rules-based international order” ritually praise, have been sluggish, if not obstructive, in participating fully in our efforts to rein in the regime.

For example, they have tried to create financial work-arounds to lessen the effectiveness of the sanctions. Just this July, our Treasury Department had to warn the Europeans to stop developing Instex, “designed to avoid using international financial institutions that could be vulnerable to U.S. sanctions. Instead, it avoids sending money to Iran by using a virtual ledger to match imports and exports. Thus, a European company wanting to import Iranian oil would pay a second European company exporting a product to Iran, such that dollars need never be sent to Tehran,” according to the Washington Examiner. Even more despicable, France has talked about giving Iran a “$15 billion line of credit to allow Iran to sell its oil abroad despite US sanctions,” the AP has reported.

https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/293996/malley-in-wonderlandLast month, Robert Malley, the former senior White House official who served as point man for President Barack Obama’s realignment strategy, published an essay in Foreign Affairs titled “The Unwanted Wars: Why the Middle East Is More Combustible Than Ever,” in which he laid out what he sees as the future of Obama’s foreign policy legacy. The piece came out in the aftermath of Iran’s attack on Saudi oil facilities, and not long after the Iranians shot down a U.S. drone—two highly aggressive events that went without any visible military response from the Trump administration. Yet the main conceit of Malley’s essay is a warning against “war with Iran.” The only alternative to “war with Iran” is presented as diplomatic engagement, the apex of which is Obama’s Iran deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). By unwinding the deal that Obama struck with the Iranian mullahs, the piece contends, the Trump administration’s regional posture sets the U.S. on an inexorable course toward war—whether the U.S. itself takes any kind of military action or not. 

“As long as its regional posture remains as it is,” Malley wrote, “the United States will be just one poorly-timed or dangerously-aimed Houthi drone strike, or one particularly effective Israeli operation against a Shiite militia, away from its next costly regional entanglement.” 

What America should, and must, do when confronted with such a tinderbox is obvious: backpedal away, fast, while kicking our former allies in the region to the curb, hard. The sentence warning of the dangers of Houthi drone strikes and effective Israeli operations encapsulates an attitude perhaps best captured in former Vice President Joseph Biden’s famous line: “Our biggest problem was our allies.” 

America’s allies are a problem, Malley, Biden, and other Obama administration policy kingpins–starting with Obama himself—have publicly stated, because of their capacity to involve the U.S. in a costly regional entanglement with Iran. In other words, America’s allies are actually our enemies. In particular, Saudi Arabia, with its reckless war in Yemen, and Israel, with its aggression against Iranian assets in Syria, Iraq, and  throughout the region, represent the “war” side of the equation—while Iran, the enemy of our allies, represents “peace.” The U.S. has a set of choices for how to engage the region: “diplomatically or militarily, by exacerbating divides or mitigating them, and by aligning itself fully with one side or seeking to achieve a sort of balance.” 

In other words, if our allies are strong, then America should seek to weaken them until “balance” is achieved, which will help bring about more “peace.” If Iran were stronger, and Israel and Saudi Arabia were weaker, then peace would therefore be more likely. American policy, in the present moment at least, should therefore be to strengthen Iran at the expense of Israel and the Saudis.