If Iran follows through on what appear to be newly-revealed designs to attack U.S. personnel, Barack Obama bears responsibility for some of the war funding.
President Trump this month ended sanction waivers for countries still buying Iranian oil, squeezing the terrorist state economy to the max by seeking to prevent Tehran from exporting any oil at all. The U.S. also just designated Iran’s notorious Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist organization.
Hardly coincidentally, Iran now has plans to target U.S. forces in Iraq and other spots in the Mideast, U.S. intelligence just discovered. In response, more U.S. forces are being deployed, including the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier strike group. This unfolds as European governments say Tehran is set to break provisions in the 2015 nuclear deal negotiated with the Obama Administration, from which Trump has withdrawn. And Iranian-backed Gaza militia just fired hundreds of rockets into Israel.
One of the glaring, damning defects of President Obama and his secretary of state John Kerry’s nuclear weapons pact with Iran — purposely designed as a non-treaty because it could never have gotten Senate ratification — was its non-linkage with Iran’s activities as the world’s leading state financier of terrorism. As a result, the agreement amounted to America letting Ayatollah Khamenei and his henchmen have access to in excess of $100 billion, without any prohibition against funding terrorism or adding to an already-oversized Iranian military.
Monies loosened to Iranian control by the Obama Administration allowed Tehran to slip many millions of dollars to Hezbollah, its proxy terrorist group in Lebanon, and to Iran’s covert operations and spy division, Quds Force, a part of its now-classified-as-terrorist Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.
‘Slush Fund for Weapons, Terror, and Oppression’
Equally troubling, Iran has also used the money Obama placed at its disposal to back Yemen’s Houthi rebels, part of a long-term strategy to undermine Saudi Arabia, which despite its Islamic extremism is a moderating force in the Mideast that the U.S. militarily supports.
Trump has called this aspect of Obama’s Iran nuclear deal “a slush fund for weapons, terror, and oppression” and a means “to further line the pockets of corrupt regime leaders.”
The economic pressure President Trump is imposing is blunted by all that cash provided in Obama and Kerry’s quest for a grand international milestone to place them in the history books. Worse still is the knowledge that any Iranian artillery that kills or maims U.S. servicemen or women in the coming months may be found to have been paid for from accounts made available by a Democratic President.
Proponents say it was a price worth paying to end Iran’s nuclear program, but the deal only delayed its progress for a decade. And that assumes no cheating by the world’s worst terror state.
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