21-May-16: Darker sides of the JCPOA, the agreement that never was, emerge

Aspirational J Street: Changing the world is an
expensive undertaking [Image Source]

In the US world of liberal public radio, there's considerable agitation in reports emerging yesterday (like "Did $100K grant to NPR help sell Iran nukes deal?" from the website of an NPR affiliate) that large swags of cash were instrumental in the process of making that pro-JCPOA echo chamber of which Ben Rhodes recently boasted. 

It turns out NPR got $100,000 of that, which is making some people in NPR's world uncomfortable and for good reason. How do you do an honest job when someone is sending you cash to do it in a specific way?

But compared with some others, NPR got chickenfeed.

Ploughshares Fund, one of the "outsourcing" agencies (that's our word, not his) Rhodes explicitly mentioned in that famous NYT Magazine interview, is described in a Friday report ["Group that helped sell Iran nuke deal also funded media", Associated Press] as being really proud of the role it played:

Ploughshares boasts of helping to secure the deal. While success was "driven by the fearless leadership of the Obama administration and supporters in Congress," board chairwoman Mary Lloyd Estrin wrote in the annual report, "less known is the absolutely critical role that civil society played in tipping the scales towards this extraordinary policy victory." The 33-page document lists the groups that Ploughshares funded last year to advance its nonproliferation agenda.

If the name is not already familiar, there's some background in a Wall Street Journal piece from last year that explains how Ploughshares Fund was part of a behind-the-scenes White House strategy designed to "help overcome opposition to an Iran nuclear agreement". Ploughshares is

a San Francisco group started in the 1980s to resist nuclear war between the U.S. and Soviet Union. The nonprofit group has invested more than $7 million in the past four years in think tanks, media organizations and activist groups focused on championing diplomacy with Iran. The Ploughshares coalition includes a former Iranian government spokesman, the liberal Jewish organization J Street and a group of former American diplomats who have held private talks with Iranian government officials.,, ["Barack Obama Ramps Up Lobbying on Iran as Deadline Looms", Wall Street Journal, March 29, 2015]

Its website states its goals in admirably succinct terms:

How do we do it? By funding organizations and people who promote the elimination of nuclear weapons, prevent the emergence of new nuclear states, and build regional peace.

Who else got some of those Ploughshares payments? According to AP

• National Iranian American Council: $281,000
• The Arms Control Association: $282,500
• Brookings Institution, $225,000
• Atlantic Council, $182,500 

among others.

But, as far as we can tell from the reports, one group scored more than twice the amount any other did: 

"J-Street, the liberal Jewish political action group, received $576,500 to advocate for the deal." [AP]

If J Street (of whom we asked some JCPOA-related questions a few months back here) has explained this yet, we're not aware of it. It's not one of those achievements that people proud of their work ought to hide, you might think. Especially if regional peace is part of what it achieved. (We're not clear on which region.)

By the way, all the talk - yet again - of a deal or an agreement or a treaty or something signed with the Iranians is seriously misleading, as we explained in "29-Jul-15: Built not on trust but on... verification". Nothing was signed with them, and that's a deliberate part of Iran's strategy.

01-Dec-15: For this Washington insider, "successes" with Arafat, Hamas and Iran are but prelude to the ISIS chapter

Malley is third from left in this March 2015 group photo of the 
negotiations in Lausanne, Switzerland towards the glorious signing of a 
peace agreement with Iran [Image Source]

Over at the Liberty Unyielding group blog, Commander J.E. Dyer provides some startling analysis today about a new appointment to the influential post in the US administration of "ISIS Czar". This concerns a man who 

favors talking to terrorists, and has urged the world to do just that with the homicidal baby-killers of Hamas.  As a bonus, he made contacts with Hamas himself, something that you would still be under hostile surveillance for by U.S. agencies, if you had done it. And now he’s going to be Obama’s top advisor on ISIS.  Yay! ["Not-the-Onion: Obama appoints Hamas homie as his top advisor on ISIS", November 30, 2015] 

Commander Dyer's personal blog made us aware just a couple of weeks ago of another startling aspect of the White House's approach to the battle to defeat ISIS, namely that

75% of the strike sorties flown against ISIS by our aircraft return to base without bombing anything.  U.S. Central Command reported that in operational statistics months ago, and it was picked up by stateside media as early as May 2015. But there was a focus in May on the lack of immediate tactical intelligence on potential targets: without boots on the ground to direct airborne strikes, the implication was that we couldn’t use air power effectively... [Now it appears] the issue is not so much the lack of tactical intelligence, as the paralyzing fear, in the White House, of collateral damage from dropping bombs under any circumstances. ["Theoptimisticconservative's Blog", November 21, 2015]

That appointment of a "czar" for America's ISIS strategy concerns Robert Malley. An Obama insider for years, he was abruptly dropped as foreign policy adviser in the first Obama campaign (2008) in the wake of revelations about the man's personal contacts with Hamas. Dyer terms that evidence of his "ridiculous unsuitability for a major post with a mainline party candidate". We think that's a spot-on assessment.

Years before, as "Special Assistant to President Clinton, he was a member of the U.S. peace team and helped organize the 2000 Camp David Summit." That total failure, we recall, led directly to the outbreak of the bloody Arafat War (the so-called Second Intifada) launched by the Palestinian Arab leadership just two months later.

His re-emplacement inside the circles of Washington power has been dramatic. In March 2015, he was elevated to Special Assistant to the President and White House Coordinator for the Middle East, North Africa and the Gulf Region. In that capacity, he

put his stamp on the negotiations with Iran in 2015.  (In fact, we are advised that he participated in the celebratory toast, with a bottle of fine Madeira donated from Portugal, enjoyed by lead negotiators John Kerry and Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz.  Take that, ISIS!) [Dyer again]

(More about the wine here in the Washington Post.)

From a quick reading (we admit we don't know his work-product well), he has what seems like an idiosyncratic way of looking at the Islamist terrorists of Gaza. Some comments he made about them in the wake of their bloody crushing Fatah to grab control of the Strip betray an astounding degree of openness to happy endings, despite all the evidence to the contrary. He wrote this in 2006:

Hamas' electoral landslide might optimize conditions for its political transition, for victory is likely to inhibit it far more than would have defeat. The more Hamas exercises government responsibility, the less it is likely to revert to violence; the greater its electoral mandate, the lesser its freedom of action... If dealt with wisely, the Islamists' victory could present an opportunity for the United States to promote its core interests without betraying its core principles..." ["Making the Best of Hamas' Victory", Robert Malley via Common Ground website, March 2, 2006]

Knowing what we know about Hama's exercise of "government responsibility", and what this has brought the region and especially Palestinian Arab children, we're wondering if we somehow missed the retraction and apology that Malley published - somewhere.

And did we mention that, in Wikipedia's words, he's "involved in the J Street project"?

And now he gets to be involved in providing ISIS-directed advice to the Leader of the Free World. That's really worrying.

02-Sep-15: Plans of action and how Iran thinks like some Washington lobbyists do

Senator Mikulski looks on as President Obama signs an important document
that is certainly not an agreement with Iran since that has not been
signed by anyone [Archive photo source]

There are distinct whoops of triumph emanating from Washington today as Barbara Ann Mikulski, the senior Senator from Maryland, a member of the Democratic Party, steps forward to express support for the intentionally-unsigned pact ["29-Jul-15: Built not on trust but on... verification"] that the Islamic Republic of Iran entered into with the United States and some other countries a little over a month ago.

The significance of today's news:

The announcement means that at least 34 senators -- the number required by the Constitution to sustain a veto -- will back Obama's expected veto of a Republican resolution to disapprove of the deal. Mikulski is retiring at the end of her term. [CNN, September 2, 2015]

Now that a third of the Senate have told the news services how they are going to vote on probably the most important US foreign policy undertaking in living memory, the very carefully named JCPOA (not an agreement, not a treaty, just a plan of action) is being treated by everyone as a done deal, some sort of democratic achievement (or is it Democratic achievement?)

Everyone, we assume, thinks that having committed themselves publicly, none of these politicians will back down when the vote is taken in Congress in a few weeks' time, no matter what facts or additional secret side-deals may get revealed or brought to their attention in the meantime. Politics.

The head of a high-profile political lobbying group closely identified with the Obama administration emailed several friends of ours in the past couple of hours with a victory letter that includes this puzzling assertion:

Extract from a letter sent by this lobbying organization to supporters earlier today

It's clear that Jeremy Ben Ami, the author of those stirring words and the leader of the J Street people, is speaking of the Middle East. But even when you take account that he is sitting in far off, well-protected Washington DC, which part of the Middle East does he have in mind? He knows of some corner that has been transformed, presumably far from people's attention and news media enquiries, into a place where conflicts are being settled "through negotiations and diplomacy"? Does he mean Syria? Maybe Yemen? Libya? Iraq? Lebanon? We really do want to know.

Could he have composed this right after the celebratory toasts were drunk?

As it happens, Iran believes in plans of action, including the one the US Senate appears to have just pushed over the top. A report published today by the oddly-named PressTV, one of the Islamic Republic's numerous official, semi-official and regime-controlled mouthpieces, shows (see it below) that the Iranians actually think very similarly to some Americans. 

Or at least to Mr Ben Ami and his J Street crowd.

Iranian mouthpiece leads with this report today [Source]

But much, much more significantly, here's how some other Iranians see things. This is also from today.

Escalating Iran’s rhetoric against Israel, a senior commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps vowed Wednesday that the regime would boost its military capabilities relentlessly until Israel was destroyed. “The Islamic Revolution will continue enhancing its preparedness until it overthrows Israel and liberates Palestine,” the IRGC’s Tehran province commander, Brigadier General Mohsen Kazzemeini, said in an address in Tehran, the semi-state Fars news agency reported. He also vowed that Iran would maintain its aid to those who fight Israel. "We will continue defending not just our own country, but also all the oppressed people of the world, specially those countries that are standing on the forefront of confrontation with the Zionists..."
In its report on Gen. Kazzemeini’s speech Wednesday, Fars recalled that Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in an address to Tehran students last year, called for the “full annihilation and destruction of the Zionist regime.” On Tuesday, the commander of IRGC, Gen. Mohammad Ali Jafari, threatened Israel, saying “its security will not be preserved” and asserting that the dangers posed to Israel were “growing greater by the day.”

The FARS source article ["Commander: Iran Continues Military Enhancement Until Collapse of Israel"] went online a couple of hours ago, just after the Mikulski announcement, by coincidence. Or not.

We think that neither a J Street response, nor any other meaningful plan of action emanating from Washington to address the naked threats of mass destruction by the nuclear-thirsting Iranians ought to be expected anytime soon. Or ever.