The impending decision by President Joe Biden to revive the nuclear deal with Iran has been widely criticized. It’s hard to find anyone who can make a reasonable case for empowering the world’s #1 sponsor of terror.
Mossad chief David Barnea, according to Hebrew media outlets, has called the accord “a strategic disaster” that gives Iran “license to amass the required nuclear material for a bomb” and provides Tehran with “billions of dollars in currently frozen money, increasing the danger Iran poses through the region via its proxies.”
Iran’s danger to the region has been well covered. But how much is President Biden aware of Iran’s danger to Americans, of its longtime lust to kill Americans?
According to the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Iranian military action, often working through proxies using terrorist tactics, led to the deaths of well over a thousand American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. Iran reportedly paid Taliban fighters $1,000 for each U.S. soldier they killed in Afghanistan.
“The Islamic Republic has been carrying out a campaign of assassination, kidnapping and intimidation of its critics from its earliest days,” Bret Stephens writes in The New York Times, noting that many of these victims have been Americans. It’s a long list. The tentacles of the terror regime reach far and wide.
So, what gives? How does one explain President Biden’s rush to throw $100 billion a year, according to some estimates, to empower an enemy that calls America “The Great Satan?”
The only explanation I can think of is a repeat of what happened a year ago in Afghanistan, when the president stubbornly decided that “we must leave” come hell or high water. When hell and high water came, nothing could change his mind, not even for a gradual exit that would mitigate the tragedy.
He seems equally determined to sign a deal with Iran, come hell or high water. Biden is a man of photo opps, not deep thought or strategy.
Just as he overlooked the disastrous repercussions that would follow his bungled withdrawal from Afghanistan– so he could boast that “I got us out of there”– he’s overlooking the disastrous repercussions of caving in to Iran, so he can boast that “I brought us back to the deal.”
It’s not pleasant to discuss such simplistic motivations about the leader of the free world in the face of such high stakes in a dangerous and complex geopolitical conflict. At the very least, if he does decide to sign the deal, Biden will owe us a compelling explanation for why the deal is good for America.
I hope he won’t tell us that he wants to lower gas prices before the midterms.
