One of the major themes of my new book, Iran’s Final Solution for Israel, is the abject failure of imagination regarding the Islamic Republic of Iran, which transcends the political and ideological Republican/Democratic party, and Right/Left, divides.
Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the craven capitulation to Obama administration demands that Congress “butt out” of the “P5 +1” sham agreement process which has provided dangerous U.S. and international validation of Iran’s uranium enrichment program.
As reported by Al-Monitor yesterday (3/27/14), House lawmakers are crafting a “bipartisan” bill targeting Iran’s jihad-terror “proxy” Hezbollah, having acquiesced to the Obama administration’s demand not to address Iran’s relentless pursuit of nuclear capabilities, whose ultimate goal has long been acknowledged to be the production of nuclear weapons. The Hezbollah-limited focus, though allegedly “in the works for several months,” in reality represented bipartisan subservience to Obama administration wishes, gaining momentum,
after Democrats acceded to the Obama administration’s request that Congress butt out of the multiparty nuclear negotiations with Iran. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has blocked a vote on a bipartisan Iran sanctions bill that has garnered 59 cosponsors, and the House has also lifted the pressure since passing its own sanctions bill on a 400-20 vote last summer.
Pressed by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, during hearings on February 4, 2014, U.S. chief negotiator with Iran Wendy Sherman conceded that the P5 + 1 agreement, failed to “shut down” Iran’s continuing development of ballistic missiles. These weapons, which have long range capabilities, are the preferred devices for delivering a nuclear payload. Senator Bob Corker (R., Tenn.), the committee’s ranking member, raised the appropriate questions, interspersed with relevant commentary:
Why did you all not in this agreement in any way address the delivery mechanisms, the militarizing of nuclear arms, why was that left off since they [Iran] breached a threshold everyone acknowledges.? They can build a bomb. We know that. They know that. They have advanced centrifuges. We have a major loophole in the research and development area that everyone acknowledges. We are going to allow them over this next year to continue to perfect the other piece of this, which is the [nuclear] delivery mechanism. Why did we do that?
Within 2-weeks later, Ms. Sherman admitted that if Iran’s nuclear program was only for peaceful purposes, the Islamic Republic “does not need” the fortified, underground uranium enrichment center at Fordow, or its plutonium heavy-water reactor at Arak.
One would have hoped that Wendy Sherman’s candid February 2014 acknowledgments strengthened the resolve of those U.S. lawmakers who have questioned the sobriety of the P5 +1 interim deal with Iran. Those hopes have now been dashed by our Congressional “hollow men/The stuffed men.”
Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps Deputy Commander Brigadier-General Hossein Salami made the following comments at a conference held in Tehran, which aired on Al-Alam TV on March 11, 2014:
Despite the geographical distance, we are attached to the hearts of the Palestinians. How is it that our slogans and goals are identical to the slogans and causes of the Palestinians? Why do we strive to become martyrs and risk our lives for the Palestinian cause? The answer is that the religion of Islam has designated this for us – this goal, this motivation, this belief, this energy – so that we, here, can muster all our energies in order to annihilate the Zionist entity, more than 1,400 kilometers away. We are ready for that moment in the future.
The Left says either the good general Salami doesn’t mean any of this, i.e., it is just “cultural bluster”—which of course shouldn’t be criticized at any rate, because that would be “racist.” The openly antisemitic hard Leftists admit they just don’t care if Israel is annihilated in a nuclear jihad.
Conservative “Iran shenasans”—(alleged) “Iran experts”—say he’s simply “distorting” Shiite Islam and we must be patient, support the Soylent Green Movement of Iranian Jeffersonian Democrats, and “regime replacement” will solve the Iranian nuke and all other such problems engendered by the “distortion of Shiite Islam.” Ignore the hard data that show 83% support for Sharia in Iran—that too is “racist”—or if not racist, “Islamophobic”
Till now, those are your Iran policy options from the ones who control such discourse—and current or planned actions—on the Left and Right.
