" May 5, 2015
The Obama Deceit Doctrine
By Ed Lasky
Americans (at least those paying any attention) know that Barack Obama routinely lies to fulfill the one promise he has not broken: to “fundamentally transform America.” But what he has done to empower Iran and pave its way to develop nuclear weapons trumps even that boastful claim: Obama wants to, and probably will, fundamentally transform the world.
When he campaigned in 2008 Barack Obama dismissed concerns over Iran: it is just a “tiny” country that doesn’t pose a threat to us the way the Soviet Union did during the Cold War. This was absurd. Singapore is tiny; Andorra is tiny; the Vatican is tiny; Iran is not tiny. There are at least 80 million Iranians and the nation itself sprawls over key geographic territory (being able to project its power over important oil-producing nations and shipping lanes; its warm weather ports have always been a tempting target for the Russians).
But then again, Obama is a geographically challenged president (there are not 57 states in America , Hawaii is not in Asia; they don’t speak Austrian in Austria; Illinois is closer to Kentucky (they share a border) than Arkansas (they do not share a border). Iran has also been consistently held to be the number one terror-sponsoring nation in the world, responsible through its proxies, such as Hezb’allah and Shiite militias in Iraq for the deaths and injuries of thousands of Americans. Given the economics of terrorism, violence against America can be done on the cheap, so a comparison between America’s military budget and Iran’s, something Obama is wont to do, is meaningless.
Obama’s political handlers quickly realized the gaffe about Iran in 2008 had to be erased from memory. Barack Obama shifted his tone: declaring he would do “everything in my power to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. Everything. He periodically repeated this promise when he thought it could pay political benefits to him.
Well…words are cheap (like terrorism).
Once he became president, the deceitfulness of his promise became clearer -- especially in his second term when he reminded us he would never be on a ballot again and when he could go Bulworth and do whatever he wants as president .
Indeed, deceitfulness has become his standard operating procedure-especially when it comes to helping the mullahs of Iran-who hate America with more loathing than even Israel-get nuclear weapons.
Michael Doran recently wrote in his superb “Obama’s Secret Iran Strategy” that Barack Obama, from the inception of his presidency, pursued “détente” with Iran. All else, especially allies in the region, were sacrificed to this goal. Ben Rhodes, Obama’s foreign policy guru (quite a role for a failed short-story writer with zero diplomatic or national security experience) likened an Iranian nuclear deal to the passage of ObamaCare:
This is probably the biggest thing President Obama will do in his second term on foreign policy. This is healthcare for us, just to put it in context.
As Rick Richman wrote, Obama is using some of the tactics employed to pass ObamaCare to pass an Iran deal. Among those tactics is a resolute refusal to allow Congressmen (as well as the rest of America) to know any details of the deal. Shades of “have to pass the bill to know what is in it” -- this, from the administration that declared it would be the most transparent in history. The deal with the mullahs would be presented as a fait accompli.
But that tactic would be mild compared to the deceit that would follow.
Very early in his presidency, the White House had information that Iran had been operating a secret underground nuclear plant. The White House kept this secret for them for months until “Mr. Obama’s hand was forced” (as the New York Times reported) when the Iranians realized other western intelligence sources had this information and disclosed it themselves. The White House recently engaged in the same practice when it cast doubt on reports of yet another secret Iran nuclear facility.
To backtrack, there is a group of nations called the P5+1 (the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, plus Germany) that has been negotiating with Iran. The Joint Plan of Action (JPOA) was the first step taken. This was purportedly a way to freeze the Iranians’ nuclear work while negotiations continued on a more comprehensive deal.
Barack Obama and John Kerry have repeatedly declared that the JPOA has succeeded and the nuclear program has been frozen. This is deceitful.
One key provision of the JPOA was that any enriched uranium that Iran produced after the JPOA was signed had to be chemically converted to a less dangerous form. This was not done. Furthermore, while Obama claimed, “we have halted the progress of the nuclear program” he was wrong. Iran’s centrifuges were allowed to continue to spin as rapidly and repeatedly as Obama spun the “success” of his deal with Iran. He even repeated the claim in a State of the Union Address, during which he also claimed that “unprecedented inspections” under the JPOA had “helped the world verify every day that Iran is not building a bomb” and won some more Pinocchios to add to his burgeoning collection from Glenn Kessler, the fact-checker at the Washington Post.
This is just one example of how the White House seems to be working in tandem with the mullahs to suppress evidence of their cheating. This deceitfulness began early, buttressing Doran’s view that there was always a secret plan to appease Iran.
Barack Obama has repeatedly claimed that Iran has abided by all the terms of the JPOA (Obama: ”Iran has met all its obligations”). Just as repeatedly, the Iranians have violated the terms of the JPOA. As Michael Makovsky writes in the Weekly Standard (Iran’s Cheating: Can’t Trust, Can’t Verify):
In the past year alone Iran has violated its international agreements at least three times. First, even though the interim Joint Plan of Action (JPOA) prohibited Iran from enriching uranium in any centrifuges that were not in use at the time the deal went into effect in January 2014, last November the IAEA caught Iran operating a new centrifuge—worse still, it was an advanced IR-5 model. Second, the JPOA required Iran to process any low-enriched uranium it produced during the deal’s term from the gaseous form used for enrichment into a solid that can be used as reactor fuel, so that it would not be readily available for further enrichment and potential breakout. As of February 2015, Iran had an excess of some 300 kilograms of low-enriched uranium, in violation of the deal’s terms. Third, in parallel to the JPOA, the IAEA and Iran signed a Framework for Cooperation under which Iran agreed to answer outstanding IAEA concerns about the possible military dimensions of its nuclear program. Iran answered only one question to the IAEA’s satisfaction and, for the past six months, has been stonewalling on the rest. This recent record of cheating, while Iran was negotiating a comprehensive arrangement and thus incentivized to be good, bodes poorly for the future under a new accord.
The White House routinely dismisses evidence of Iranian cheating.
When Iran was caught testing an advanced centrifuge (a violation under the JPOA), the White House said it was just a “mistake” by some low-level employee, as if some Iranian scientist tripped and accidentally injected UF6 into an advanced IR-5 centrifuge, as a friend sarcastically wrote. The excuse beggars belief, especially since it was not Iran spinning but the American president.
Is the White House doing more than just serving as a defense lawyer for the mullahs?
Reuters recently reported that Iran has continued to actively procure equipment for its nuclear program but that member states seem to have halted reporting these violations to avoid “undermining the delicate nuclear talks.” Is this a deceitful way to aiding and abetting the Iranian regime by actively suppressing evidence that Iran has continued to develop its supposedly frozen nuclear program?
Isn’t suppressing information that casts aspersions on Iran a key part of the Obama doctrine? Tom Jocelyn speculates the White House refuses to release documents found in the Bin Laden raid because they would show Iranian ties to Al Qaeda. Iran and its proxy Hezb’allah were quietly removed from a list of terrorism threats this past February by Obama’s Director of National Intelligence. Iran’s role in the genocide occurring in Syria is never mentioned. Iran’s nefarious role South of the Border is complacently dismissed, and its violating of a wide range of other agreements is dismissed as a non-factor in any nuclear deal because a nuclear deal is distinct from other deals in being “aspirational” ((
http://www.c-span.org/video/?325740-1/state-department-briefing-at the 5:20 mark) -- whatever that means. Does the White House believe any of this nonsense?
For years, the administration has been claiming the mullahs can be trusted because their Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, issued a fatwa forbidding the development of nuclear weapons. As Scott Johnson writes at PowerLine, the supposed fatwa is a hoax. Yigal Carmon of the well-regarded Middle East Research Institute has investigated and reports, “There is no such fatwa. It is a lie from the Iranians, a deception, and it is tragic that President Obama has endorsed it.”
It does not exist and, even if it did, it could be revoked on a moment’s notice. Experts have looked for the supposed fatwa and it is a myth. But Obama and Kerry continue to peddle it. Again, the Deceit Doctrine in action.
But that is not the only myth they are peddling.
The White House apparently is promoting an Iranian Disinformation Claim, Hassan Dai recently wrote in the Iranian American Forum:
Proponents of the nuclear deal with Iran, including those within the U. S. government, have repeatedly argued that pressing Iran’s dictatorial regime to give up its nuclear program completely is futile, because the enrichment of uranium is wildly popular with the Iranian people. Hassan Dai explains that the deal’s supporters have been snookered:
This claim [about the program’s popularity] is part of the Iranian regime’s disinformation campaign, which started in 2003 and includes a total ban on opposing the program, jailing the critics, holding state-organized rallies in support of the program, and fabricating public-opinion polls in Iran for a U.S. audience. The majority of these polls are conducted by a Tehran-based center tied to the Iranian security forces. These polls are publicized and promoted by pro-Tehran groups in Washington, many of them close allies of the Obama administration. . . .
The claim that the majority of the Iranian people support the regime’s nuclear program, or that this program—largely unknown to the vast majority of Iranian—has become an issue of national pride, as well as the ridiculous allegation that Iranians “prefer to forgo an agreement and muddle through under existing sanctions rather than accept the halt to enrichment,” are baseless.
White House officials know a thing or two about disinformation.
Ever since Hassan Rouhani was elected President of Iran, the administration has promoted the view that he was a moderate that could be trusted. Both are false claims. He is not a moderate and he has boasted of successfully lying and deceiving the West in the past about the Iranian nuclear program. More importantly, he is a figurehead, a front man, for the distinctly non-moderate Supreme Leader. Even this White House could not burnish Khamenei’s image, so they just ignore his role and deceive Americans into believing Rouhani rules Iran.
The disinformation does not stop there.
For example, for years they have reassured Americans that Iran was not even close to having enough enriched uranium for a nuclear bomb. However, Energy Secretary Moniz recently acknowledged that the White House has known for years that Iran was far closer to this point than officials, including the president, had been publicly stating.
Eli Lake writes in Bloomberg News:
When Obama began his second term in 2013, he sang a different tune. He emphasized that Iran was more than a year away from a nuclear bomb, without mentioning that his intelligence community believed it was only two to three months away from making enough fuel for one, long considered the most challenging task in building a weapon. Today Obama emphasizes that Iran is only two to three months away from acquiring enough fuel for a bomb, creating a sense of urgency for his Iran agreement.
Back in 2013, when Congress was weighing new sanctions on Iran and Obama was pushing for more diplomacy, his interest was in tamping down that sense of urgency. On the eve of a visit to Israel, Obama told Israel's Channel Two, "Right now, we think it would take over a year or so for Iran to actually develop a nuclear weapon, but obviously we don’t want to cut it too close."
What is obvious is that Obama and his team have been deceitful.
White House officials have not just been deceitful to Americans. They take pride in having been deceitful to one of America’s closest allies, Israel. White House officials somewhat notoriously promised the Israelis they would deliver a good nuclear Iran deal if only the Israelis held off on attacking Iranian nuclear infrastructure -- and then turned around and publicly boasted about having sandbagged Netanyahu, whom they labeled a chickens**t coward for believing them . That must mark a new low in American history: openly boasting of successfully deceiving one of our closest allies facing the prospect of another Holocaust.
Perhaps the most recent example of deceit was Obama declaring that a “historic” agreement has been reached with Iran over its nuclear program. Obama stated that the agreement would impose rigorous verification programs on the Iranian nuclear program (including searches on military bases), would permit only a phased removal of sanctions on Iran, and would contain snapback provisions that would automatically re-impose sanctions if the Iranians were found cheating (of course, the White House turns a blind eye to cheating anyway). The Iranians have, as has been widely reported, denied any of these provisions were part of the agreement, as have the Russians. In fact, there is no deal-as even John Kerry admitted this week. So Obama’s spiking of the football was not just premature but apparently a fabrication to derail Congressional actions on Iran. It was a faux “deal.” This is deceit.
So the Obama Doctrine has been uncovered and can be summarized in one word: deceive."
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