It takes a leader of integrity and solidity to confront evil regimes. Had the likes of Churchill and Roosevelt or Reagan and Thatcher been the likes of Obama and Biden, would those pairings have held fast against the 3rd Reich and the Soviet Empire? Clearly they would not.
Iran can hardly be considered as today’s equivalent evil empire. It therefore has to be asked why the Obama-Biden axis respects it like one.
Their latest move, Joe Biden’s appointment of Jack Lew to be his Ambassador to Israel, demonstrates the Mullahs’ magnetic – one might say fatal – attraction for the axis power. Classic wartime leadership was ready to kill the partisan impulse for the sake of prosecuting hot or cold war. Not so Obama and Biden, ready to go the pompous way they share. Back in March 2015 CNN addressed that way by posing,
“If it looks like a treaty, walks like a treaty and talks like a treaty, is it a treaty? According to the White House, only if the President of the United States says it is. That’s infuriating Republicans and even some Democrats who are demanding that the Obama administration submit any final nuclear deal with Iran to Congress for approval. It represents the newest clash with President Obama over the limits of executive authority, as Republicans object to a pact they warn could eventually give Tehran a nuclear bomb.”
Enter Jack Lew, at one time Obama’s man and now Biden’s. Lew, currently a visiting professor at Columbia, served as White House Chief of Staff and then Treasury Secretary under Obama. Biden has plucked him from a New York private equity firm to put a gloss on some devilish diplomatic moves to give Iran whatever it wants, hang the Israeli government’s deep anguish. Lew was the obvious pick for the task of hoodwinking Biden’s oldest friend PM Netanyahu.
Back in June of 2015 Obama appointed Lew to sell his pet project, a deal with the devil, to Jewish Americans. “The final deal,” Lew told a Jerusalem Post conference, “will be built around an incredibly robust and intrusive inspections regime on Iran’s nuclear program. This deal will only be finalized if the connective tissue of the agreement meets a tough standard of intense verification and scrutiny.”
Here was the perfect case of Orwellian speak. The reality was that Obama had agreed to put Iran’s ‘military facilities’ off limits to IAEA inspectors, and to delay inspection of nuclear sites until such time as cleans ups or cover ups could be finished. Not good enough? Obama allowed, in good faith, Iran to submit the soil samples required by IAEA inspectors. All of these fine details his Jewish liaison man Lew forgot to tell. He did however tell that “we are not operating on an assumption that Iran will act in good faith.” Word for word that is the assumption on which Obama was operating. He himself alluded to trusting Iran in an interview with The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg.
“There are deep strains of anti-Semitism in the core regime,” Obama conceded, “but they also are interested in maintaining power.” It left even Obama fan Goldberg wide-eyed. “It’s my belief,” he told the President, “that it is difficult to negotiate with parties that are captive to a conspiratorial anti-Semitic worldview; not because they hold offensive views, but because they hold ridiculous views… I don’t believe that the regime can be counted on to be entirely rational.”
Of course the regime was all too rational. It saw the treaty that wasn’t a treaty for what it really was: its green light to cheat all the way to the Bomb.
No denying he’s very brilliant, Jack Lew. One can trace much of the evil in modern history to brilliancy. America’s Covid Tsar Anthony Fauci is only the latest mass destroyer of life and livelihoods. “What we are doing,” Lew said, “is to effectively guarantee that Iran never obtains a nuclear weapon. Making sure Iran never gets a nuclear weapon is a national security priority of the highest order.” To which ZOA's Mort Klein accurately elucidated, "Never" actually meant ten years. Klein also recalled that Lew boasted at the same Conference that his boss had done more than anyone on behalf of Israel’s security.
Without doubt the brag marked the epitome of Jack Lew’s efficacious lying.
Fact is, the deal Lew’s boss cobbled together was more a swap than a deal of give and take. Obama swapped the blood of Jews for a reptilian ally. The sordid game began with the vilest act. President Obama’s fixers stopped Argentine’s wheels of justice turning – in the literal sense of the term. The law was taking its long course when Obama told it to stop. His pet project deal came first. A monumental investigation into the AMIA bombing had made Alberto Nisman, a government prosecutor, a Jew, into a world celebrity. By 2006 Nisman had managed to indict seven members of Iran’s government, one a former President and Foreign Minister.
Then he did one better. Nisman secured international arrest warrants for five of the seven Iranian suspects, thus locking them into Iran. The resolute Nisman had compiled a docket a million-pages thick, in addition to a secret 300- page docket against Argentine President de Kirschner and her cronies. They had invented Tehran’s innocence in order “to pursue commercial, political and geopolitical interests.” So a vixen and four international terrorists exchanged barrels of oil for sacks of grain, topping the deal with Jewish blood by the barrel.
At this point Biden’s boss – and Jack Lews’ – came into the despicable picture. Western diplomatic sources disclosed that the Obama Administration had twisted Argentine arms to end the investigation of Tehran’s complicity in the AMIA attack.
It was to be the reward for sitting at the Obama gambling table, to go through the motions of signing his signature deal. Obama’s fixers met with Argentine officials on different occasions. As the source close to Argentine leaders explained:
“One of the first demands by Iran to the Obama administration was that Argentine be pressed to drop arrest warrants,” said a source close to Argentine leaders. “Within months, the meeting was followed up with a higher level one where Argentine leaders were asked to lay off. They eventually complied.”
All this devilish diplomacy had nothing to do with Don Corleone’s, ‘keep your friends close but your enemies even closer.’ Obama’s motive according to, (a) Michael Doran of the Hudson Institute and (b) Obama himself, according to what he told The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg was, and likely remains, to make Iran into a regional power.
Nor has Obama and his sidekick Biden kept Middle East allies close. They have been left bewildered and hurt. When it came to telling the Mullahs to stop calling America the Big Satan Obama faded; when the Mullahs called for a mushroom cloud over Tel Aviv he listened. Add in Obama’s signature aversion to the military option, and recalling the ephemeral red line he drew with Assad of Syria, Tehran understood that anything goes. Nothing would provoke Washington to retaliate.
A pet project is a human failing. And so is to bend over backwards to get the thing signed off. Consider how team Obama coaxed and coddled the Mullahs in Lausanne. It baited the hook not with palatable Swiss cheese but by taking Iran’s world-wide web of terror and proxy wars off the table. To leave office with a legacy Obama supped with a devil in thin disguise. Then came Trump. He well and truly bottled the genie. On entering the Oval Office by the back door for cheats, Biden popped the cork. Bomb-crazed Mullahs poured out, cackling over a new lease of life and freakish luck.
A crime boss octogenarian White House incumbent had set them loose.
Why would Biden do such a thing? The move can be of no visible benefit – not to America and not the free world. And there’s no way it could improve the lives of long-suffering Iranians. If he wasn’t being public-spirited or, like Obama, ambitious for himself, why rescue men soaked in barrels of blood without double-entry bookkeeping: ‘I did you a favor, now do XYZ for me.’
Of all murky lunacies, redoing a failed pact is the most devious, the most comic, the most perilous. And Jack Lew is to be paid for selling Israel one like that.
Steve Apfela veteran authority on anti-Zionism is a prolific author of non-fiction and fiction. He has authored several essays on the Iran deal articles and blogs at Balaam’s curse