Obama Already Eased Iran Sanctions Before Nuke Talks

by JASmius

Consider this a companion story to last night's post.  If the latter is the what, the former is the how:

The White House began easing economic sanctions that have crippled Iran for five years not long after its new president was elected in June — and months before Hassan Rouhani and President Barack Obama talked by telephone in September, State Department documents show.

The United States has done everything but stopped blacklisting individuals and companies that Iran evade international sanctions since Rouhani's election on June 14, The Daily Beast reports.

And the Obama administration has been doing less of that since the election, despite claims to the contrary, the website reports.

And now you know why Khamenei sent Ahmadinejad to the bench and brought in Rouhani.  It's like O was desperate to cut the mullahs a break but was too chicken to be so publicly seen as doing so with so openly a belligerent faceman fronting for Tehran.  So out goes the "bad" guy, in comes the "good" guy, and the appeasement goes quietly into maximum overdrive.

Not that this whole economic sanctions fiddle-faddle has ever made any real strategic difference.  Sanctions generally accomplish three things:

1) Punish the populace of the targeted nation, not its government;

2) Buy time for the government of the targeted nation to pursue whatever purpose the sanctioners are ineffectively attempting to proscribe;

3) Sometimes prompt the government of the targeted nation to accelerate its time table if the sanctions do start to squeeze them.

#3 was the catalyst for the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor seventy-two years ago.  FDR had slapped an oil embargo on Imperial Japan in order to force them to withdraw from China.  Since Tokyo had no intention of abandoning its expansionary ambitions in Southeast Asia and the Western Pacific, they had to move against us and the British sooner rather than later.  And it was SO helpful of President Roosevelt to have forwarded the Pacific Fleet to Hawaii to impotently "show the flag".  Saved Admiral Yamamoto's assault fleet an additional 2,500 miles worth of gas.

The lesson being, economic sanctions, like "showing the flag," are more often than not short-cuts, impotent half-measures, employed by "leaders" who lack the fortitude to recognize and do what needs to be done to avert a catastrophe - namely, invasion and regime change.  Too drastic?  Well, if you think so, don't worry, because we surely no longer possess the capability of doing so now.  But the time will also surely come when we'll all wish we'd done so when we had the ability and opportunity a decade ago.

Why?  Simple: The Iranian Islamists want nuclear weapons, and they want them for two basic reasons:

1) As a deterrent against any future Western military attempt at regime change; and

2) To wipe out Israel and the United States.

For Israel, three good-sized warheads - over, say, Haifa, Tel Aviv, and the Negev - would do the job; for us, a large warhead detonated three hundred miles or so over Kansas would destroy our entire electrical grid and send us a century and a half backwards technologically in the space of a few moments.  Otherwise known as an electromagnetic pulse (EMP)attack, it would destroy our country without a single mushroom cloud by removing at a stroke our most basic infrastructure: electricity.  When you stop and think about how much of our everyday modern life is facilitated, powered, by the "juice," it's not difficult to see how quickly our society would collapse.  Best estimates are that a year after an EMP attack on the United States, 90% of Americans would be dead, succumbing to starvation, exposure, disease, and civil unrest.  And that doesn't include follow-up conventional nuclear strikes, or conventional land invasion from whichever enemy power had the wherewithal to exploit the opportunity.

The mullahs and their minions, just like bin Laden and Zawahiri and theirs, have been bellowing, "Death to Israel!  Death to America!" for decades; did it never occur to more than a handful of us that they genuinely meant ever word, but that they haven't had the means to fully carry it out?  And that Tehran's nuclear weapons drive is meant to provide them those means?

And now who is all but handing Khamenei, or Rouhani, or whomever, the scissors to cut the ribbon on the mullah's shiny new nuclear arsenal and the ICBMs to go with it?:

In addition, the White House has been giving Iran sanctions relief in another way, Mark Dubowitz, the executive director of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, told the Daily Beast.

The group has worked with Congress and the White House to develop the current Tehran sanctions.

“For five months, since Rouhani’s election, the United States has offered Iran two major forms of sanctions relief,” Dubowitz said. “First, there’s been a significant slowdown in the pace of designations, while the Iranians are proliferating the number of front companies and cutouts to bust sanctions.”

The other way is through the Obama administration's opposition to new sanctions that have strong support on Capitol Hill.

Senator Tim Johnson of South Dakota, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, told the Wall Street Journal on Thursday that no decision would be made on further sanctions until after the Geneva talks ended.

Dubowitz estimated to the Daily Beast that Iran was selling as many as 200,000 barrels of oil every day on the underground market. The profiting of the illegal sale of more than 35 million barrels of oil since Rouhani's election comes with little obvious opposition from the United States, he said.

“Sounds like Obama decided to enter the Persian nuclear bazaar to haggle with the masters of negotiation and has had his head handed to him,” Dubowitz told the Daily Beast.

Is Barack Obama an Iranian stooge, right alongside Bashir Assad?  To a degree; I think he wants to screw Israel and is trying to use the mullahs to further that end - with which they are chortlingly overjoyed to cooperate since that is also their goal.  At the same time, he also wants to pull a Neville Chamberlain by scoring an apparent "breakthrough" deal on Iran's nuclear weapons program so that he can wave his piece of paper, proclaim "peace in our time," and bask in the public's adoring worship like in the good old days.  It'd also provide, he hopes, a further distraction from the ObamaCare disaster and the burgeoning public rebellion therein.

And if it all goes horribly wrong, well, all he has to do is go to Tehran and give another "historic" speech, and everything will be just fine.

Right?