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* Richard Kemp: Any Deal with Iran Requires Congressional Approval
* Amir Taheri: French Malaise Strikes Again
** Any Deal with Iran Requires Congressional Approval ([link removed])
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by Richard Kemp • July 9, 2023 at 5:00 am
* When President Joe Biden entered the White House... he eased off on sanctions and made it blatantly obvious he would do almost anything for a deal with Iran.
* The consequence has been uranium enrichment from 5% to 60%, and with some material up to 84%, according to IAEA suspicions — verging on the levels needed for a bomb.
* Biden was so fixated on gaining a deal that he allowed Moscow to take the lead on international negotiations, and his plans even envisaged Russia getting control of Iran's highly enriched uranium. All of this as Putin has been threatening the West with his own nuclear weapons and savaging Ukraine while US taxpayers spend billions of dollars to counter him.
* In return for virtually nothing, Tehran would get an initial $20 billion release of frozen assets with perhaps hundreds of billions more to follow, plus US undertakings not to add further sanctions or pursue resolutions against Iran in the UN Security Council or the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
* This freeze-for-unfreeze deal makes no sense on any level, especially with Iran, a country that has a track record of breaching the terms of the JCPOA not to mention its documented violations of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty which it signed.
* With Iran's long history of violence across the region and around the world, the administration can't point to any signs of a reformed, more peacefully-inclined regime that might provide some rationale for thinking it can be dealt with like a civilised country.
* The list really does go on and on. It is proof positive of Iran's continued violent intent which will be enabled and fuelled by the huge cash injection Biden is proposing. Some of this money will also of course be funnelled into Iran's nuclear weapons programme.
* Biden will also be peering down the barrel of further policy failure if Ukraine cannot prevail against Russian military might despite enormous quantities of US aid. He knows that if Kyiv cannot prevail, some of the responsibility for that will lie at his own door, given his drip-feeding of weaponry when a deluge was not only necessary but also possible. It will represent another defeat for the US and NATO on his watch.
* Add to all that Biden's misjudgement in the Middle East: not only his appeasement of Iran but also his petulant and insulting treatment of Saudi Arabia, which opened the door to the Chinese Communist Party becoming a major regional power broker.
* Israel, above all nations, cannot afford for Iran to become a nuclear-armed state. It is Tehran's number-one target. Jerusalem cannot take any chances with a regime that has repeatedly stated its intention to wipe Israel off the face of the earth and is developing the means to do so.
* What is clear is that Biden has no more intention of standing by his repeated undertakings to prevent a nuclear-armed Iran than Obama had. Like his Democratic Party predecessor, Biden has rolled over to the inevitability of Tehran getting the bomb and is opting for a policy of containment based largely on appeasing the ayatollahs, camouflaged by a nuclear agreement. It amounts to nothing less than capitulation to Iranian blackmail.
* Despite all the rumours and leaks, and even public murmurings of assent from Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, the Biden Administration maintains that a formal treaty is not on the table. This putative disclaimer strongly suggests the plan is reportedly to come to an informal agreement with Iran that would not require Congressional validation: nothing in writing, and perhaps calling the agreement something like a "meeting of the minds" or whatever.
* Unfortunately for the Biden Administration, the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act (INARA) of 2015 was enacted by Congress, with strong bipartisan support, precisely to avoid such a sleight-of-hand.
* "INARA was enacted with strong bipartisan support to ensure Congressional oversight of U.S. policy regarding Iran's nuclear program.... This definition makes clear that any arrangement or understanding with Iran, even informal, requires submission to Congress." — US Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas), Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, in a letter to US President Joe Biden, June 15, 2023. [Emphasis added.]
* Congress should not tolerate being circumvented, with its constitutional powers cynically usurped in this way.
* It is not only Israel that is threatened by another nuclear-armed terrorist dictatorship, but the entire region and the world.
It is clear is that President Biden has no more intention of standing by his repeated undertakings to prevent a nuclear-armed Iran than Obama had. Biden has rolled over to the inevitability of Tehran getting the bomb and is opting for a policy of containment based largely on appeasing the ayatollahs, camouflaged by a nuclear agreement. (Image source: iStock)
Iran is pretty much a nuclear threshold state, having enriched enough uranium to build multiple nuclear bombs within a few weeks while hard at work weaponising them in a timeframe that is so far unknown but probably under a year.
Much of this came to pass during Joe Biden's presidency. When President Donald Trump pulled out of President Barack Obama's flawed JCPOA nuclear deal, Iran's uranium enrichment was under 5% and Trump kept it there with his "maximum pressure" campaign of sanctions. The ayatollahs were also running scared of Trump and didn't want to tempt him to kinetic action, a fear reinforced by his targeted killing of the international terrorist and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps leader Qasem Soleimani in 2020.
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** French Malaise Strikes Again ([link removed])
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by Amir Taheri • July 9, 2023 at 4:00 am
* These riots did start with the killing of a 17-year boy of Algerian ancestry by the police. But the killing was not racially motivated and, as protesters made clear, what was at issue was police brutality rather than racial hatred... [T]he root cause of the anger that provoked the riots was a deep dissatisfaction with the way the country is governed.
* What has happened in France in the past five or six decades is a major change in the balance of power between the state and society. French society today is far better educated, self-confident, better informed and more enterprising than the French state, which has become costlier, less efficient and more arrogant.
* The suburbs that burned are precisely the ones that the French state has invested more than 30 billion euros in "improving" over the past 20 years. The result has been the creation of a whole generation of "assisted" people whose ethnic and/or religious backgrounds are treated as heirlooms to justify government handout in various guises.
* But just as man can't live on bread alone, he won't be grateful and obedient by handouts alone.
Pictured: An Aldi supermarket in Marseille, France on July 1, 2023, after rioters set fire to it and the building collapsed. (Photo by Clement Mahoudeau/AFP via Getty Images)
Judging by France's recent history, the month of June should be a quiet moment when people prepare for summer holidays in exotic places. Protest marches, riots and even revolutions usually take place in the spring, with May being the hottest month for political gesticulations. The baccalaureate exams are over, the annual bonuses are paid and the fruit-picking is over. Thus, the riots of the past two weeks that produced mayhem in Parisian suburbs and a dozen other places across France came like bolt out of the blue.
"Race riots shake France," was one headline in British newspapers. "Muslim youths on the rampage in Paris suburbs!" was how a German newspaper's shorthand account of the events that saw the burning of over 100 public buildings, including city halls and schools, the torching of scores of buses and trams, and hundreds of cars, the looting of countless shops, and, more dramatically, the ransacking of Bibliotheque Alcazar, Marseille's iconic public library.
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