Fifth love letter’s the charm?
President Obama’s most recent capitulation in sham “negotiations” over Iran’s nuclear program is his agreement to a seven-month delay in the deadline for a final settlement, which was to have been this past Monday. As the president must know, this delay gives the revolutionary jihadist regime everything it needs: time; further preservation and legitimization of its nuclear program; continued sanctions relief, including $700 million per month from the United States; and no pressure to acknowledge, much less repudiate, its status as the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism (i.e., the reason why its acquisition of nuclear weapons is — or at least used to be — unacceptable).
Is it any wonder the mullahs and their regime are celebrating?
The delay was driven by the unwillingness of Obama and the rest of the P5+1 negotiators (the five permanent UN Security Council states plus Germany) to adhere to Obama’s fraudulent commitment to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. The transparent purpose of extending the time for reaching a final agreement is to enable the administration and other Western governments to spin as “progress” their eventual and apparently inevitable failure.
No surprise then that the Iranian regime, which enjoys nothing more than calling the West on its fecklessness, is in full celebration mode. As the Washington Free Beacon’s Adam Kredo reports, Iran’s “moderate” President Hassan Rouhani is aptly portraying the delay as a “victory”:
Today we have a victory much greater than what happened in the negotiation,” Rouhani said. “This victory is that our circumstances are not like previous years. Today we are at a point that nobody in the world [says] sanctions must be increased in order that Iran accept P5+1 demands…. No one says to reach agreement we must increase pressure on Iran…. But they say to reach an agreement more time and more discussion is needed. This is a great victory for what the Iranian nation started since last June 15.
Rouhani added, “Centrifuges have been running and I promise the Iranian nation that centrifuges will never stop.” He further bragged that Iran had never discontinued its enrichment of uranium, and predicted that the West would fold by lifting all economic sanctions while Iran preserves its nuclear program.
Even more giddy contempt for the West was exhibited by Major General Mohammad Ali Jafari, commander of the regime’s top security force, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps. (That’s the same IRGC found by a U.S. court to have coordinated the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing that killed 19 American Air Force personnel in Saudi Arabia.) He crowed, “The Americans have very clearly surrendered to Iran’s might, and this is obvious in their behavior in the region and in the negotiations.” General Jafari promised that if the United States ever tried to attack Iran militarily, “our war will end by conquering Palestine.”
The long extension of the deadline results from Obama’s delusion that abetting the jihadist regime will pave the way for a U.S.-Iran rapprochement. Iran’s refusal to play ball is a spurning of our president by the regime’s ruler.
Like a schoolboy with an unrequited crush, Obama has now written four pleading missives to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. In the latest one (sent in mid-October and reported by the Wall Street Journal on November 6), the president tried to coax the “supreme leader” into meeting the November 24 deadline by stressing the purportedly common American and Iranian interest in fighting against Islamic State terrorists. This “common interest” rationale would be laugh-out-loud hilarious if it weren’t directed to the globe’s top terror sponsor from the putative leader of the free world.
The Islamic State is merely a renegade branch of al Qaeda. It was originally formed as al Qaeda in Iraq, at a time when Iran was harboring al Qaeda leaders while providing weapons and training to al Qaeda-affiliated jihadists who were fighting American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. That Shiite Iran colludes with Sunni al Qaeda against the Great Satan would be unsurprising to any informed person. Iran and al Qaeda have had a cooperative relationship since at least 1992. Indeed, the original indictment filed by the Clinton Justice Department against Osama bin Laden in 1998 alleges:
4. Al Qaeda … forged alliances … with the government of Iran and its associated terrorist group Hezballah for the purpose of working together against their perceived common enemies in the West, particularly the United States…
[Overt Act h.] At various times from in or about 1992 until the date of the filing of this Indictment, USAMA BIN LADEN and other ranking members of Al Qaeda stated privately to other members of Al Qaeda that Al Qaeda [which is a Sunni Muslim terrorist organization] should put aside its differences with Shiite Muslim terrorist organizations, including the Government of Iran and its affiliated terrorist group Hezballah, to cooperate against the perceived common enemy, the United States and its allies.
We’ve already mentioned the Khobar Towers atrocity. In addition, the Long War Journal’s Bill Roggio has recounted that the 9/11 Commission laid out elaborate details about cooperation between al Qaeda, Iran and Hezbollah; and very recently, LWJ’s Tom Joscelyn explained that a senior al Qaeda figure linked to the so-called Khorosan Group — the al Qaeda advisory board that the Obama administration has portrayed as responsible for planning anti-American terrorism from Syria — previously headed al Qaeda’s operation in Iran.
As Tom elaborates, al Qaeda’s longstanding presence in Iran is the result of an agreement between the terror network and the Iranian regime. In 2011, this arrangement prompted even the see-no-jihad Obama administration, through a Treasury Department spokesman, to acknowledge:
Iran is the leading state sponsor of terrorism in the world today. By exposing Iran’s secret deal with al Qaeda allowing it to funnel funds and operatives through its territory, we are illuminating yet another aspect of Iran’s unmatched support for terrorism[.]… Today’s action also seeks to disrupt this key network and deny al Qaeda’s senior leadership much-needed support.
The official went on to assert that Iran is “a critical transit point for funding to support al Qaeda’s activities in Afghanistan and Pakistan.”
Despite all this, Obama keeps writing his love letters … and, just as predictably, Khamenei keeps laughing them off. More humiliatingly, there is never a direct response from the ayatollah — just public ridicule by the regime mouthpieces he controls.
A couple of weeks after Obama’s “common interest” opus, a Khamenei spokesman announced:
The evil Americans must not think that they can achieve honor with these [nuclear] talks. If our politicians are conducting dialogue with the Americans, it is our last ultimatum. The disciples of the Prophet await an Ashura command to destroy all of them, and Islamic Iran will not rest until it avenges the spilled blood of the world’s oppressed.
Ashura is the Shiite period of mourning over the killing in 680 of Hussein ibn Ali in the Battle of Karbala, an event that cemented the Shiite split from Sunni Islam. This year, the Middle East Media Research Institute relates, Ashura coincided with the anniversary of the 1979 siege against the American embassy in Tehran by the forces of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini — the launch of the modern Iranian regime, which persists to this day in defining itself by its hatred for the United States.
It was in that context that the aforementioned General Jafari’s IRGC put out an Ashura communiqué, providing Obama with the regime’s definitive answer to the president’s “common interest” plea — as if there were any doubt:
America is still the Great Satan and the No. 1 enemy of the Revolution and the regime of the Islamic Republic. Inspired by the great lesson of the Ashura rebellion, by the eternal will of the Imam [regime founder Ayatollah Khomeini], and by the wise instructions of the dear [Supreme] Leader Imam [Ayatollah] Khamenei, the Iranian nation will never allow the Islamic homeland’s honor and independence to be threatened and harmed by the enemy. [My italics.]
Due to its arrogance and its lust for power, America is the main center of fitna [i.e., strife] and corruption in the world, and will never [be ready] for true reconciliation and friendship with a popular and independent regime that embodies the powerful life of Islam. Under these circumstances, the courageous Iranian nation still demands the prosecution and punishment of the leaders of the White House for their crimes against the Islamic Iran over the past few decades. Furthermore, in the nuclear negotiations, Iran thinks only of comprehensive and total obedience to its undisputed rights, and a full lifting of the oppressive sanctions.
It was in the face of these rebukes that President Obama acceded on Monday to the seven-month delay. That, of course, is why the regime in Tehran is celebrating this capitulation as a clear American “surrender” and as its own “great victory.”
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