Old Joe Biden’s handlers are desperate to revive Barack Obama’s Iran nuclear deal, as Biden State Department wonk Ned Price has made clear: “We are prepared, as we have said, to lift sanctions that are inconsistent with the JCPOA,” that is, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which is the official name of the agreement Donald Trump quite rightly called the worst in history. Meanwhile, as Biden’s handlers do everything they can to be conciliatory toward Iran, the Islamic regime in Tehran is more belligerent than ever. Ned Price and his colleagues would be wise to ponder whether there is a connection between those two stances, but they won’t.
Price elaborated: “We’re prepared to lift sanctions inconsistent with the JCPOA, as long as Iran places itself back within the strict confines, the strict nuclear confines of the JCPOA in terms of the stringent verification and monitoring, in terms of the other restrictions that the JCPOA places on Iran’s nuclear program.” Last Tuesday, the deputy commander-in-chief of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, Admiral Ali Fadavi, made it clear how interested Iran is in returning to any kind of “strict confines,” real or imagined.
Fadavi referred to the 2016 incident when the Iranians seized two U.S. Navy riverine command boats that had strayed (inadvertently, the Obama administration insisted) into Iranian waters and displayed the American sailors they had captured as if they were prisoners of war. “When we captured the Americans in the Farsi Island,” Fadavi said, according to the Middle East Media Research Institute, “the Americans felt superior in the first 20 minutes. They felt like a superpower, so they launched planes from their aircraft carriers. Had the Americans shot a single bullet towards Farsi Island, which is our land, we would have attacked their aircraft carrier as well as a large number of vessels in that area.”
Fadavi crowed that the Obama administration was extremely accommodating: “However, the Americans realized very soon that they were the accused, that they were the criminals on death row, and that they are at risk of being targeted by the full force of the IRGC. So they acted quickly.” Clearly the Obama team was trying to smooth over the situation, and Fadavi saw this as a sign of submission: “They replaced the person communicating with us from the aircraft carrier with a woman who spoke Persian. Two out of every three words she said was ‘fine,’ which translated into ‘I am obeying your orders.’ They did very quickly what we asked them to do.”
That incident, Fadavi asserted, was an indication of the nature of the relationship between Iran and the United States today: “This is the status of the Americans, this is the status of the enemies of Allah, and this is the status of those who stand with the axis of Falsehood. We do not have the slightest doubt that at the right time, when we strike America — the Great Satan — and its Zionist followers, we will strike them with great force.”
The blow could come from inside the United States, according to Iran’s Quds Force commander, Brigadier General Esmail Qaani. In discussing the killing of his predecessor, Qassem Soleimani, Qaani declared: “We will prepare ground for the hard revenge against the US from within their homes.”
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Fadavi, meanwhile, was just as belligerent toward Israel: “As Imam Khamenei famously said a long time ago, when the Zionists were entertaining some illusions… He said: ‘If they take even the smallest step [against us] we will turn Haifa and Tel Aviv into dust.’ If the Zionists do something stupid and take a step against us, whether big or small, we will see this as a sign that Allah decreed that we should be attacked so that we could retaliate. This would mean the annihilation of the Zionists. It is a fact that the Zionists will go away much faster than the time frame determined by the Leader.”
These were not threats. They were predictions. “Soon,” Fadavi continued, “we will witness the annihilation of the Americans and their dominance over the world, and specifically over this region. Soon we will see them leave the region. This will definitely happen.”
Antony Blinken and Ned Price and the rest of the State Department “foreign policy experts” who are working so hard to revive the Iran nuclear deal should ponder Fadavi’s words carefully. The fruit of appeasement is invariably the emboldening of the appeased power, not its pacification. But it is unlikely that Blinken and Co. even know the lessons of history, much less know to avoid repeating catastrophic historical mistakes.
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