When Sundown Joe takes office on Wednesday, the old gang will be back in the saddle again: the foreign policy establishment hacks who have done nothing but fail, fail, and fail again, and in response keep getting rewarded not with dismissal and a forced return to private life, but with honors, awards, and promotions. AFP reported Saturday that Biden has appointed Wendy Sherman, whose chief claim to fame is negotiating the notorious Iran nuclear deal, to be deputy secretary of state. It’s a classic example of failing up.
Biden said of Sherman and anti-Russia career diplomat Victoria Nuland, whom he named undersecretary for political affairs, that they “have secured some of the most defining national security and diplomatic achievements in recent memory. I am confident that they will use their diplomatic experience and skill to restore America’s global and moral leadership. America is back.”
Well, that may be overstating the case, but there is no doubt that the disastrous State Department “experts” are back. Sherman is getting her promotion nearly two years after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu unveiled 55,000 pages of documents and 183 cds demonstrating that “Iran did not come clean about its nuclear program,” and that it pursued a program “to design, produce and test five warheads with 10 kiloton of TNT yield for integration on missiles.”
When Iran’s leaders denied that they intended to construct nuclear weapons, Netanyahu said, they were “blatantly lying.” He charged that “Iran lied about never having a secret nuclear program. Secondly, even after the deal, it continued to expand its nuclear program for future use. Thirdly, Iran lied by not coming clean to the IAEA.”
Wendy Sherman’s Iran nuclear deal was, according to Netanyahu, “based on lies based on Iranian deception.” The Islamic Republic’s Fordow nuclear plant was, he said, “designed from the get-go for nuclear weapons for project Amad…We can now prove that project Amad was a comprehensive program to design, build and test nuclear weapons. We can also prove that Iran is secretly storing project Amad material to use at a time of its choice to develop nuclear weapons.”
The head of project Amad was a nuclear scientist named Mohsen Fakhrizdeh.
In the two intervening years, Netanyahu’s presentation has been mocked, derided, or ignored altogether, but it has never been disproven. Even aside from it, as The Complete Infidel’s Guide to Iran shows, the deal was foredoomed in the first place, and had no chance of being effective to stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons. The deal runs out in 2025. What about after that? Nothing. Apparently, at that point, Iran would be free to build nuclear weapons with no objections from anyone.
Even worse were the deal’s provisions for verification. It contained the provision that Iran could delay requested International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspections for up to 24 days — ample time to clean up for the inspectors. The return to the deal will also be accompanied by a removal of sanctions that will get Western cash flowing once again into the Islamic Republic. What did Iran’s mullahs do with the billions Barack Obama showered upon them? They financed jihad terror groups around the world. What will they do now with their Biden money? Almost certainly the same thing.
What’s more, the deal, in its 159 pages, went into tremendous detail about the Iranian nuclear program and how it was to be temporarily restricted in various ways. It also expatiated at length on exactly which sanctions were to be removed. But it was conspicuously lacking in specifying penalties for Iran’s not holding to the agreement. There was vague talk about the sanctions being reimposed, but no concrete guidelines about how that was to be done, and nothing said about recovering money given to Iran in the interim.
These and other terms were, obviously, absurdly easy on Iran. What exactly did the rest of the world get out of this agreement when it was originally concluded? Only a newly flush and increasingly bellicose Iran, thanks to Barack Obama. And now Joe Biden is rewarding the chief architect of this mess with a promotion for her incompetence. Nor is Wendy Sherman alone: the entire foreign policy arm of the Biden administration is set to be staffed by these failures, phonies, and frauds. But with the establishment media doing everything it can to put the best possible face on the coming fiasco, most Americans will have no idea of what is going on, or why.
Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He is author of 21 books, including the New York Times bestsellers The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) and The Truth About Muhammad. His latest book is Rating America’s Presidents: An America-First Look at Who Is Best, Who Is Overrated, and Who Was An Absolute Disaster. Follow him on Twitter here. Like him on Facebook here.
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