Iranian Nuke Deal Will Bring On More Terrorism

Iran Deal: $150 Billion to Fund Obama's War

by George Phillips
July 28, 2015 at 4:00 am

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/6225/iran-150-billion-dollars

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• The Iran deal does not prevent a nuclear Iran. At best, it only delays it a few years.
• Under the disastrous Iran nuclear deal, $150 billion would go to a single regime that has been a state sponsor of terrorism for the entire 36 years of its existence.
• The Iran deal, in five years, will actually lift a ban on sending Iran conventional weapons, including (in eight years) intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of hitting the United States. But Iran is already wasting no time buying weapons and producing weapons on its own.
• When Obama leaves office, he may think that any catastrophe the Iran deal causes will not "technically" be his, but the next president's. But it is his. It's as if someone is lighting a long fuse and will then say he was not near the dynamite when it went off. Any explosions that result from this huge military and financial payday to Iran will, and should, be known as "Obama's war."

In 1947, U.S. President Truman made history by launching the Marshall Plan, sending $13 billion (about $140 billion in today's dollars) to help rebuild post-war Europe, in order to prevent Western Europe from falling to Communist expansion.
Today President Obama is trying to make history through an Iranian nuclear deal that will givean astounding $150 billion of sanctions relief to a regime that was in 2014 considered by the U.S. Department of State, along with Sudan and Syria, one of the world's leading sponsors of terrorism.
The Marshall Plan was spread out over 17 countries that were U.S. allies and considered critical in the long struggle that would put Soviet communism on the "ash-heap of history," in the words of President Ronald Reagan.
Under the President Obama's disastrous Iran nuclear deal, $150 billion would go to a single regime that has been a state sponsor of terrorism for the entire 36 years of its existence.
$150 billion is an enormous amount of money to the Iranian regime, whose failed statist economic policies, ongoing expansionism and internal mismanagement -- not even to speak of its horrifying human rights record in imprisonments, torture, and widespread executions -- have led to a stagnant economy.
How might Iran spend the $150 billion?
Iran has brutally cracked down on dissent in its own country. It brutally imprisoned, tortured, and murdered those in the Green Movement, whose peaceful demonstrations, begun in 2009, had brought together up to three million protesters, and which threatened to topple the regime.
With the new inflow of money, Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) will have many more resources at its disposal to crush dissent and tighten its grip on power, making regime change -- which should be our urgent and ultimate goal, rather than a fleeting nuclear deal -- all the more unlikely.
Iran has backed the Assad regime in Syria, helping it keep control in a brutal civil war that has cost over 210,000 lives.
Assad even wrote a congratulatory letter to Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei about the deal, probably in the likely assumption that he will get a substantial boost from this $150 billion boom.
A flush $150 billion in the hands of the Iranian regime will also likely give a boost to the Iranian-sponsored Houthi rebels trying to take over Yemen.
Iran has in the past used its Shia militias to kill an estimated 500 Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan.
While the Iraqi Shia militias may be fighting ISIS now, they almost certainly will be fighting and killing more moderate Sunnis in Iraq, who worked with the U.S. government and are willing to work for a peaceful Iraq.
Iran has long backed Hezbollah, Hamas and other terrorist groups trying to destroy Israel.
Iran is already sending millions of dollars to Hamas to build and repair tunnels for use in kidnapping and murdering Israelis, and to rebuild Hamas's missile supply.
Iran's Lebanese proxy, Hezbollah, already has an estimated 100,000 missiles it could use to attack Israel.
With $150 billion, Iran can fund a massive new war against Israel through its terrorist proxies -- using conventional weapons -- to try to obliterate Israel even before Iran gets nuclear weapons.
The fact that Iran pushed to have the UN arms embargo lifted as part of the nuclear deal shows its intentions for where to spend this $150 billion.
The Iran deal, in five years, will actually lift a ban on sending Iran conventional weapons, including (in eight years) intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of hitting the United States. But Iran is already wasting no time buying weapons and producing weapons on its own.
Russia recently finalized the sale to Iran of the S-300 anti-aircraft missile system -- in violation of the existing embargo.
Although there may still be an official UN arms embargo on Iran, there is no ban the transfer of raw materials that they could use to make arms domestically. Iran already has an advanced weapons manufacturing industry.
If the Iran nuclear deal goes through, the mullahs will have to decide how much of the $150 billion will be used to boost their own arms manufacturing efforts and shore up their domestic reign of terror, and how much will be shared with their totalitarian and terrorist allies?
The Iran deal does not prevent a nuclear Iran. At best, it only delays it a few years.
Iran has brazenly vowed not to change its current policies and will continue to finance war, through its terrorist partners, against Israel and Sunni Muslim states. With ICBMs, Iran will not only threaten Middle East neighbors, but also the United States and Europe.

Why is Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif so happy? Zarif is shown hugging French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius at the close of nuclear talks in Geneva, Nov. 23, 2014. (Image source: ISNA)

When President Obama leaves office, he may think that any catastrophe caused by the Iran deal will not "technically" be his, but the next president's. But it is his. It's as if someone is lighting a long fuse and will then say he was not near the dynamite when it detonated. Any explosions that result from this huge military and financial payday to Iran will, and should, be known as "Obama's war."
Members of the U.S. Congress should move swiftly and boldly to vote this terrible deal down and try to stop the $150 billion from going to boost tyranny and terrorism and spread war throughout a region already on fire.

George Phillips served as an aide to Congressman Chris Smith of New Jersey, working on human rights issues.

Foreign Aid Follies

We have asked this question before, what happened around 1950 to change things in the United States? In that time we have not won a war, we have seen our morals drop into the gutter and our debt increased dramatically to levels never seen before by any other country.

Could our foreign aid gifting of billions be part of the problem? Is giving money a way to win friends and influence enemy? What would happen if we suddenly stopped giving all foreign aid?

All of our money for the most part has been a losing enterprise.  We have not influenced our enemies and our friends, for example, Israel, receive significantly less money than its enemies. Our enemies laugh at us as we shovel money to their leaders and they spend money to build gorgeous palaces while the citizens starve.

Anytime someone tries to influence others by giving them money, they no respect and little influence. That is the situation with the US.  

Conservative Musings

U.S. Taxpayer Money: Making Dictators Rich And Perpetuating Instability For More Than 70 Years

March 27, 2013 by Sam Rolley 

PHOTOS.COM

Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) has been making waves in the GOP in recent months as he tries to push a more libertarian philosophy in the party. But old guard neocons like hawkish Senators John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) are hell-bent on ensuring that Paul and his legislative allies do not affect Congress’ beloved military-industrial complex — even if it means allowing American infrastructure to deteriorate as the Nation pumps billions of dollars overseas.

Last week, during the Senate budget “vote-a-rama,” Paul and Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) offered amendments that would have reduced the amount of U.S. foreign aid and freed up funding for other projects. Paul’s effort would have allocated $16 billion for repair and replacement of structurally deficient bridges and other domestic infrastructure projects through cuts to Energy Department loan guarantees and foreign aid spending.

Every Democrat present voted against the Paul amendment, as did 19 Republican Senators including McCain, Graham and Kelly Ayote (R-N.H.). A similar scenario played out with regard to an amendment proposed by Cruz that would have reduced foreign assistance to Egypt in order to provide a missile defense system on the eastern seaboard of the United States.

For their efforts, which the Senators must have known were damned from the get-go in a Congress that believes spending more is saving, “wacko birds” like Paul and Cruz were blasted with a familiar neocon criticism: Spending less on foreign aid is isolationist foreign policy that will embolden international terrorists.

McCain suggested that Republican disagreement over the appropriate amount of foreign aid is a decades-old argument exacerbated by tough economic times.

“That fight has been going on since prior to World War II,” McCain said. “It’s always been there, and it always will be. It’s exasperated and exaggerated by bad economic times.”

He added, “We’ve always had this struggle within the Republican Party going back to post-World War I when the Republicans — isolationists kept us from joining the League of Nations. The isolationists prior to World War II, which meant we were not ready — the anti-military after Vietnam … where we had a hollow army.”

McCain is right to suggest that for more than 70 years the United States has been engaged in providing big-money aid to foreign countries to the dismay of America’s fiscal conservatives. What the Senator failed to note, however, is that those on his spend-happy side of the debate have almost always won and that U.S. foreign aid has almost always been historically judged by its intentions rather than results.

Prior to WWII, American benevolence was mostly provided to foreign countries via private donors in the United States. That changed with the introduction of the Marshall Plan (officially known at the European Recovery Program), which poured more than $13 billion into Europe to help the war-torn continent rebuild. Most analysts agree that Europe would have recovered without U.S. aid, but the aid helped strengthen top-down government structures that were more willing to bend to the will of U.S. wishes.

The apparent success of the European welfare plan led then-President Harry Truman’s 1949 proposal of the Point Four Program to provide a smaller version of the Marshall Plan for poor countries in Africa, Asia, and Central and South America.

Thus, the floodgate was opened.

In the years since, the United States has provided aid to countries all over the world in the form of food assistance, economic development and even general budget support. Over the same period of time, Congress has noted and attempted to reform terrible failures in the foreign aid system that have rendered funds provided to countries ineffectual or, worse, harmful.

Despite being ineffective and a waste of American taxpayer dollars in most cases, there are some reasons why foreign aid remains sacrosanct to Democrats and some Republicans. Democrats, who pride themselves of being a sort of party of compassion, relish the idea of helping hungry children the world over and providing for the needs of the world’s poorest people. And Republicans like McCain, for their part, often see a strategic national security benefit to buying friends in certain parts of the world.

Unfortunately, Congress and financial accountability are almost completely mutually exclusive. And when it comes to foreign aid dollars that are pushed through a system of bureaucratic chutes and ladders in the U.S. and abroad, accountability is impossible.

Setting utopian goals for how foreign aid money is to be spent makes everyone feel warm and fuzzy, but the reality remains that the appropriated dollars are often reduced to pennies when they finally come to be used for the purpose for which they were intended.

If you think foreign aid is a boon to the world’s poor, consider the path a dollar must take before it reaches its final resting place in the country to which it was given as outlined byeconomist Peter Bauer.

First, it must be allocated by the donor country’s government. That government has its national political, military, and economic objectives, such as supporting friendly states, selling its food and weapons, promoting its own consultants, intervening in international conflicts, and so on. Traditionally, much of bilateral foreign aid has been tied to purchases from donor countries, although apparently this phenomenon has seen some decline (Easterly 2009).

Money provided by the United States for the purpose of foreign aid passes through many hands before it reaches its final resting place, and this often takes place in notoriously corrupt countries. In fact, a recent report produced by Transparency International illustrated that some countries receiving handsome sums of U.S. foreign aid also have the highest instances of perceived corruption. They include (listed from most to least corrupt): Afghanistan, $8 billion in foreign aid; Iraq, $1.7 billion in foreign aid; Yemen, $64 million in foreign aid; Pakistan, $2.1 billion in foreign aid; Lebanon, $232 million in foreign aid; Egypt, $1.6 billion in foreign aid; and others. For foreign aid to work as intended in these places, one must assume that government officials of foreign nations are dedicated to the welfare of their people — a tough sell for Americans who aren’t even sure their politicians are.

In addition to the propensity of corrupt governments to skim off the top of foreign aid money, another problem with U.S. foreign aid policy exists: Lawmakers are either too lazy or too heavily lobbied to re-evaluate the purpose of foreign aid when its effectiveness of use comes into question.

One good example of this is the foreign aid money still being pumped into Israel and Egypt as a result of an agreement reached during the Camp David peace accords in 1978. In return for not blowing one another off the face of the Earth, the United States offered billions of annual dollars to both countries for development.

Today, Egypt remains impoverished, corrupt and largely in the control of Muslim extremists. And Israel has used the aid money to finance the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, to implement wage and price controls, to provide subsidies for inefficient government companies and to put into place a make-work full-employment program custom-made to reduce productivity throughout the 1980s, nearly killing its economy. In essence, Israel has used the money in many of the same ways bureaucrats in the U.S. waste taxpayer dollars.

Unfortunately, many Americans continue to believe that the United States has some celestially ordained obligation to continue providing upward of $3 billion in annual aid to Israel. That, combined with the unrelenting Jewish lobbying efforts aimed at members of Congress, protects the Israeli honeypot, even as the U.S. faces economic demise of its own.

If the real goal of American foreign aid policy is, in fact, to protect allies such as Israel in harsh regions of the world, providing less monetary foreign aid makes perfect sense. This holds true because the billions of dollars provided by the United States to protect Israel are being negated as foreign aid money pumped into other, far less friendly nations in the Mideast are being used to fund an arms race.

In fact, as has been noted by Paul, the U.S. gives more aid to Israel’s neighbors than to Israel in the form of monetary aid and reduced-price armaments. So if the U.S. provides Egypt with 20 F-16 fighter planes, Israel turns around and — likely using foreign aid funds — purchases 25.

In fairness, despite the fact that foreign aid is being stolen by corrupt government officials the world over and creating arms races in destabilized regions, the money has done some historical good by way of eliminating disease in some parts of the world. Supporters point to those small victories and advocate for continued foreign aid spending at current levels (more than $56 billion annually), arguing that the money only accounts for about 1 percent of the U.S. budget. But should it not be duly noted that the $85 billion sequester that the Nation’s lawmakers — both socially liberal Democrats and military-industrial-loving Republicans — just finished wetting themselves over represents a similarly miniscule portion of the budget?

If isolationism means re-evaluating foreign aid expenditures for effectiveness, any Senator calling himself a fiscal conservative should relish in being branded as such by the likes of the McCain and his neocon and Democratic acolytes.

Though President Ronald Reagan was no reformer of foreign aid, he did give the idea lip service in 1981, saying, “Unless a nation puts its own financial and economic house in order, no amount of aid will produce progress.”

With $16 trillion in debt and budget crisis on top of crises, it’s past time to heed those words.