With everyone’s attention on Ukraine, this seems the opportune time to come to an agreement with the mad mullahs in Iran so we can pretend they won’t build nuclear weapons for a while.
Biden and the U.S. negotiators surely have no illusions about Iran at this point. The 2022 Annual Threat Assessment, published on Tuesday by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), made that absolutely crystal clear.
The threats aren’t directed at Biden’s people. The Iranians have the hots for Trump and his people.
CBS News has obtained two persistent threat assessments submitted to Congress by the State Department in January 2022 which cited a “serious and credible threat” on the lives of former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and former Trump administration Iran envoy Brian Hook. These non-public assessments show that throughout 2021, and again in 2022, the State Department assessed the need to provide round-the-clock, U.S.-taxpayer funded diplomatic security details to both men.
The Washington Free Beacon had reported on these blood-chilling threats in January. But the Biden administration doesn’t appear to be too worried — at not least, not worried enough to threaten to walk out of the nuclear talks unless Iran stops targeting American diplomats.
Trying to kill other nations’ diplomats directly contravenes international law, several treaties to which Iran is a signatory, and common decency. But Biden and his crew desperately need a foreign policy win to get his numbers up with Democrats, and making nice with terrorists is very popular in some leftist circles.
On Face the Nation this past Sunday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken sidestepped a question about whether a renewed diplomatic agreement with Iran regarding its nuclear program would also address threats on U.S. soil, including any targeting his predecessor, Mike Pompeo, who was secretary of state when the assassination strike against Soleimani took place. Blinken instead addressed the broad threat posed to U.S. personnel from Iranian malign actors, saying, “We will stand and act against those every single day.”
The secretary has previously said that Iran is weeks away from obtaining enough fissile material for a nuclear bomb, hence the U.S. attempts to revive the 2015 international agreement known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which would lift sanctions on Iran in exchange for a temporary cap on its nuclear development. President Trump exited the JCPOA in 2018 by sanctioning Iran, and in July 2019, Iran began nuclear-related activities that exceeded limits of that agreement. The intelligence community assesses that if Iran does not win sanctions relief, then it will proceed with enriching nuclear fuel to weapons grade material.
Iran was “weeks away” from being able to construct a weapon back in 2015 when the deal was first signed. That agreement did not slow Iran in its drive to build a bomb. The highly enriched uranium that Iran sent to Russia for “safekeeping” was returned to Tehran a few months later. And while Barack Obama bragged that the deal stopped Iran from improving its centrifuge technology, the Iranians read the deal differently and were installing centrifuge machines that were three times more efficient in enriching uranium.
Now Iran has even better centrifuges—and many more of them.
The crime is that this is no surprise to the Biden administration. They know that Iran isn’t going to stop until they have a working bomb. Now, with the Ukraine War taking everyone’s attention, Biden plans to quickly wrap up the negotiations and announce that he’s brought peace in our time … or something.
“We were very clear when we were in the deal originally that nothing about the deal prevents us from taking action against Iran when it’s engaged in actions that threaten us, threaten our allies and partners. That will very much continue,” Blinken said.
House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff agrees that the threats do not have to be addressed in any renewed nuclear-related deal with Iran.
“These other malign activities of Iran’s, their plots against the U.S. personnel or Americans around the world we can deal with and have to deal with separately, and we should deal with them aggressively,” Schiff told Face the Nation, Sunday. “We need to go after all of this, not necessarily in one agreement.”
Let’s get this straight: Iran could assassinate Pompeo or any other Trump-era U.S. official and it wouldn’t stop the nuclear deal? That’s a “separate” issue and shouldn’t get in the way of our surrender on the nuclear deal?
Our nation’s security is in the very best of hands.
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