Credit Where Credit is Due
By: Andrew Talebi
Tags: USA, Biden, Trump, America, Foreign Policy

In 1979, my father boarded an airplane alone with approximately $1,500 in his pocket to leave the only place he had ever known, and the place he had called home, in order to escape the violent and chaotic overthrow of the government in Iran. To hear him tell the story of what took place in the streets between the moment that the Iranian Revolution began and the moment that he escaped is jarring. I have no way of doing the entire story any justice but I know some readers have heard him tell this tale firsthand and I have witnessed their shock as he relays his experience.

There is one aspect of the story that I can share which can serve as an illustration for the events on the ground as they unfolded. While he was a student at the University of Tehran, my father’s roommate was an outspoken opponent of the Islamic radicals that would soon take over the country. One evening, the roommate told him that he was going to attend an anti-revolutionary rally. My father watched from the window as his roommate got in his vehicle and drove away, being trailed by another car as he drove off into the distance. That day was the last time he saw, heard from, or learned anything about the whereabouts of his roommate.

The Revolution lasted just over a year, involved the Hostage Crisis that was the central plot of the movie Argo, and left the country in ruin. Once the deposed government fled the nation, the leader of the Revolution, Ruhollah Khomeini, installed himself as the Supreme Leader and Ayatollah of Iran. Thereafter, he consolidated power and established what is now known as the Islamic Republic of Iran. All told, approximately 8,000 political dissidents or holdovers from the prior government were executed by the newly established Islamic Courts and the estimates for total casualties range as high as 60,000.

The current government of the Islamic Republic of Iran is organized as a theocracy, governed by Sharia Law, and ultimately led by the Ayatollah. There are “elections” for president, but each candidate for president is vetted and approved by the Ayatollah prior to the campaign and everyone in the “civilian government” serves at the pleasure of the Ayatollah. There is a Legislature but the High Chamber (known as the Guardian Council) essentially serves as the primary lawmaking body and virtually all of its members are appointed by the Ayatollah.

As the country is governed by Sharia Law, women are viewed with secondary status. The Ayatollah is on record stating that gender equality is “unacceptable to the Islamic Republic.” As a result, women’s rights in Iran are non-existent and those women brave enough to advocate openly for women’s rights are often jailed. Few women hold any positions of authority in society, and in the home, their husbands retain primary control over domestic affairs, often resulting in patterns of coercion, physical violence, and marital rape (a crime currently unrecognized in Iranian law).

The Islamic Government maintains a warped stream of propaganda as part of its effort to maintain control over the citizenry. Iran continually ranks near the bottom in the world for press freedom and the government regularly imprisons and tortures any journalists that are perceived to publish any anti-government reports, criticisms, or opinions. The government is notorious for concealing any scandal that might cast doubt as to the legitimacy of any power exercised by the Ayatollah. Nowhere is this made more apparent than its secret digging of mass graves throughout the country to bury the dead as it mismanages the Covid crisis while asserting that there is no crisis at all.

Since taking power, the Iranian government maintains two primary foreign policy ends: (1) tension with America (usually tied to the periodic “Death to America” rallies); and (2) the Iran-Israel Cold War, in which Iran seeks to dissolve the State of Israel. In pursuit of these ends, since 1984, Iran has sought to develop a nuclear bomb, both as a means of deterring American intervention in the country and as a means to achieve its stated goal of destroying Israel.

The primary security force of Iran is known as the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. (“IRGC”), which was recently given its appropriate designation as a terrorist organization by the American government. Through the IRGC, Iran funds and otherwise offers logistical assistance to Hezbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and a variety of other terrorist organizations throughout the Middle East. The IRGC has a storied history of vicious and violent human rights abuses, largely focused on the torture, imprisonment, and summary execution of political dissidents.

The government, through the IRGC, violently suppresses any civilian demonstration of any type that might challenge the government’s absolute authority. Following the presidential elections in 2009, violent protests sprung up throughout the country as there was doubt as to the legitimacy of the results. At the time, it was the largest uprising since the Revolution and resulted in open conflict between the IRGC and the civilian population, leaving 108 dead and 4,000 arrested and imprisoned.

More recently, the 2019–2020 protests, dubbed Bloody November, were in reaction to hyperinflation of fuel prices. In response to the uprising, the IRGC shot at the citizenry from rooftops, imprisoned and tortured children, and killed no less than 1,500 Iranians. To end the uprisings, the Ayatollah expressly instructed the IRGC to “do whatever it takes to end it.” Some of those arrested during or after the protests have been sentenced to death.

In fact, in 2019, Amnesty International said the following about Iran:

The authorities heavily suppressed the rights to freedom of expression, association and assembly. Security forces used lethal force unlawfully to crush protests, killing hundreds, and arbitrarily detaining thousands of protesters. The authorities arbitrarily detained over 200 human rights defenders and imposed sentences of imprisonment and flogging against many of them. A new law allowed Iranian women married to men with foreign nationality to pass on Iranian citizenship to their children, but women continued to face discrimination and the authorities intensified their crackdown against women’s rights defenders campaigning against forced veiling laws. Ethnic and religious minorities faced entrenched discrimination. Torture and other ill-treatment, including through the denial of medical care, remained widespread and systematic; they were committed with impunity. Cruel, inhuman and degrading judicial punishments were carried out. Scores of people were executed, sometimes in public; several were under the age of 18 at the time of the crime. There were systematic violations of fair trial rights. The authorities committed the ongoing crime against humanity of enforced disappearance by systematically concealing the fate and whereabouts of several thousand political dissidents extrajudicially executed in secret in the 1980s.

These are the murderous thugs that took over and currently govern Iran. So afraid of this tyranny is my father that since his departure in 1979, he has never returned for fear that the government will not let him leave the country again. The consequences of that decision are that he has not seen his baby sister since 1979 and he has had to miss both of his parents funerals.

It is for these reasons that when the political discourse concerns our foreign policy with respect to Iran, it is deeply personal to me. For decades, this country has hemmed and hawed as it attempted to appease, negotiate, and renegotiate with this criminal cartel to arrive at some bogus “peace agreement” to which Iran has continually reneged. See for yourself the perpetual slog of attempts at a deal that have ultimately proven to be worthless.

Each time this country has attempted to make a “deal” with Iran, the story plays out the same way. Iran reneges on its promises, continues to fund terror groups throughout the region, furthers its pursuit and development of a ballistic missile program specifically geared toward delivering a nuclear weapon, and receives economic relief from sanctions which enriches the Ayatollah and his associates. The latest iteration of these efforts was the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (“JCPOA”) brought on by the Barack Obama administration.

The JCPOA sought to limit Iran’s sensitive nuclear activities in exchange for the easing of economic sanctions and unfreezing of Iranian assets worth $100 billion. Under the terms of the JCPOA, Iran was: (1) limited in the number and types of centrifuges it could operate until 2026; (2) precluded from enriching uranium until 2031; (3) precluded from building additional heavy water reactors until 2031; and (4) required to permit International Atomic Energy Agency (“IAEA”) inspectors into the country to access any sites deemed suspicious.

It did not take long for Iran to slip back into its old habits. By May of 2016, Iran had already begun blatantly violating the terms of the JCPOA. Like its predecessors, the only winner in this “deal” was Iran, as it was able to syphon millions of dollars from sanction relief into the coffers of the Ayatollah and the mullahs in exchange for nothing. The strategy of attempting to negotiate with this Mafia of liars, crooks, and terrorists has been both an exercise in futility and abject failure.

Credit where credit is due: on the singular issue of foreign policy with respect to Iran, Donald Trump and his administration got it right.

The first decision was to terminate our involvement with the JCPOA. When Trump pulled out of the JCPOA, the political and media establishment went absolutely bonkers. Some said that this would inevitably lead to war with Iran. Others, including Obama, said that America terminating its involvement in the deal would encourage and quicken the pace with which Iran could pursue its nuclear ambitions. Finally, the move was condemned as abandoning our allies, chiefly in Europe, and viewed as an abdication of American leadership in the region. All of these takes were demonstrably wrong.

It is no longer reasonably in dispute that the JCPOA is and was of no value. But this revelation does not come from American think-tanks or policymakers. Rather, it comes from our friends in Germany, who now state unequivocally that the 2015 deal is “no longer enough” and that a new “nuclear agreement plus” is needed to curb Iran’s ballistic missiles program.

Said another way: the Iranian government was pursuing enriching uranium and developing its ballistic missile program in contravention of the JCPOA the whole time. It never had any intention of honoring the agreement. The only motivation that it had was to feign cooperation so that it could continue to obtain relief from economic sanctions and prop up its economy long enough to obtain the bomb. As it turns out, Trump was vindicated in his decision and the tightening of sanctions has crippled Iran’s economy, frozen $1.75 billion in Iranian assets, left the country isolated, and its influence in the region weakened.

The next major decision was the targeted assassination of Qasem Soleimani, widely regarded as the second most powerful figure in Iran and a major general in the IRGC. Again, the reaction from our supposed political and media betters was absurd. John Kerry, the former Secretary of State of the Obama administration and the chief architect of the JCPOA, foreshadowed that this strike could lead to a reckless and needless war. The Atlantic, a publication that once contained thoughtful debate but now deals only in peddling paranoia, could not shed enough tears for the loss of this scum:

Again, each of these takes completely missed the mark.

To start, in 2007, the George W. Bush administration designated the Quds Force (the special forces of the IRGC which Solemani ran) a terrorist organization. Furthermore, since at least as early as 2013, Iranian proxies coordinated by Soleimani killed at least 600 Americans in Iraq. Known as a “shadow commander,” Soleimani wielded enormous influence in the region and was directly responsible for training and deploying proxy fighters supporting Bashar al-Assad in Syria (who, by the way, deployed chemical weapons attacks on his own citizens during the ongoing civil war which has cost the lives of over 500,000 Syrians), Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthi rebels in Yemen, and Shiite militias in Iraq.

To put it bluntly: Soleimani was the terrorist leader of a terrorist special forces subset of a state-sponsored terrorist organization seeking to maintain a proxy war with American troops and was attempting to do so in an American war zone. Unsurprisingly, Soleimani was in Iraq attempting to mastermind additional attacks on American troops when he was assassinated. His killing severely weakened Iran’s influence in the region as it lost its grand strategist and the man singularly responsible for a sprawling web of violence and mayhem throughout the Middle East.

But you don’t have to take my word for it. Take the word of General David Patraeus, who says:

“It’s impossible to overstate the significance of the attack that takes out Qasem Soleimani and the number two militia leader in Iraq as well, who also never dared to set foot in Iraq during the surge after we’ve missed him and he escaped […] So this is bigger than [Osama] bin Laden. It’s bigger than [Abu Bakr al-] Baghdadi.”

Finally, through intelligence sharing with Israel, we recently learned that Iran was harboring the second in command of Al-Qaeda and the mastermind of the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa. After this was discovered, at the request of our government, Israeli operatives assassinated him in the streets of Tehran. Moreover, in further efforts to curb Iran’s nuclear ambitions in the absence of a worthless nuclear deal, the Israeli security forces assassinated Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the head scientist of Iran’s nuclear program, generally viewed as their Robert Oppenheimer.

Even on these developments, the reactions have framed the issues incorrectly. John Brennan, the former CIA Director of the Obama administration, slammed this killing of an “eminent Iranian scientist.” Nevermind that as CIA Director, Brennan saw fit to drone strike half of the Middle East back into the 1400s with impunity, he also materially omits a fact which he knows or should know: that Dr. Fakhrizadeh was a chief commander/brigadier general in the IRGC, as opposed to some guy in a lab coat playing with his Bunsen Burners.

All of this was achieved without sending a single American troop half way around the world to participate in a new war in a new foreign land (and, in fact, Trump is bringing more troops home). The end result of these decisions is what decades of lazy attempts at dealmaking failed to bring about: a regionally weakened Iran, unable to exert its will or influence events outside of its borders, with severely diminished nuclear development capabilities, and a government facing a crisis of legitimacy with its people. An unintended result of these policies has also been the historic peace deals between Israel and many Arab states, much to the chagrin of Kerry, who said such a result will never happen.

I take no great joy in crediting Trump, much less for these achievements, but as I have previously written, sometimes our opponents are right. It is entirely possible that he bungled his way into these results rather than carefully deliberated and executed a coherent plan. However, in the end, the results, facts, and evidence of the success of Trump’s foreign policy in this area are not reasonably in dispute and I invite anyone who reads this to substantively challenge any of the points raised above to demonstrate that anything that I have presented is inaccurate.

To be clear: there is much in Trump’s four years of foreign policy strategy to complain about. However, him being wrong about other areas does not make him wrong in this instance, and him being right in this instance does not absolve him of his errors in other areas. Nevertheless, we should applaud when American interests abroad are positively defended and advanced, even if we politically disagree with the people doing the defending and advancing.

Going forward, I think that it would be a mistake for Joe Biden and his incoming administration to attempt to rejoin the JCPOA or to attempt to negotiate a new deal, as he has signaled some willingness to do. It was no mystery that Iran was rooting for Biden to prevail in November and their government is already on record stating that it looks forward to a change in American foreign policy. The world is not the same place that it was five years ago and governing as such by regressing to a demonstrably failed deal accomplishes nothing of value.

Dealmaking only works when the parties to the deal are prepared to negotiate in good faith, make sacrifices, and walk away from the table slightly upset with the results. Iran, as its government is presently constituted, has repeatedly demonstrated that it is not and has never negotiated from a position of good faith. As such, they are not deserving of a seat at the table, much less an opportunity to write or modify the terms of any deal.

It is my hope that the incoming Biden administration maintains a firm policy of economically isolating Iran. As the furor of the Revolution fades further into history and coalesces with the self-inflicted, economically fraught realities of present-day brought on by the government’s belligerence, it is my belief that the day of reckoning will soon come for the Ayatollah and his criminal friends. It does not benefit our country, the broader Middle East, or the world to stall their inevitable fate.

Their tickets to hell were punched a long time ago. Let them board the train.