Rep. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md, demonstrated once again that he puts party before country last Thursday, when Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi whipped him on Iran. In comments on WBAL News radio 1090, and to the Baltimore Sun, Van Hollen tried to spin his support for the Obama administration’s nuclear deal with Iran as somehow beneficial to America’s only true ally in the Middle East, Israel.
“I have concluded that this agreement advances the national security interests of the United States and all of our allies, including our partner Israel,” the would-be U.S. senator said.
But as any freshman learns in English 101, saying something doesn’t make it so.
Like Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry, Van Hollen argued that the Iran deal rolls back Iran’s nuclear program and has to be judged against the consequences of what the future would look like without a deal.
But any semi-literate observer of Middle Eastern affairs has a pretty good idea of what the world would look like without this disastrous agreement that guarantees Iran will become a nuclear weapons state in somewhere between eight to fifteen years.
It would look pretty much as it has looked over the past ten years. During that time, as the Bush administration, then the Obama administration, marshaled international support for sweeping economic and financial sanctions, the Iranian regime demonstrated a certain caution in its international behavior.
Rather that openly seek to commit genocide against Israel, it “merely” armed Hezbollah in Lebanon and ordered them to launch thousands of rockets into Israeli towns and cities in July 2006 with the intent of murdering as many civilians as possible.
Rather than attack American warships openly, as Iran threatens to do today, the Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps “merely” gave thousands of explosively-formed penetrators — a deadly new form of IED — to its proxies in Iraq and Afghanistan and offered a bounty for each American soldier they killed. As we learned thanks to Senator Ted Cruz, R-Texas, at a Senate Armed Services hearing last week, more than 500 U.S. servicemen have lost their lives as a result.
Rather than openly attack its main Islamic rival, Saudi Arabia, the Iranian regime has “merely” armed anti-Saudi Houthi rebels in neighboring Yemen, which Saudi Arabia has long considered part of its strategic depth.
And these are but a few examples.
Emboldened with nuclear weapons, or a nuclear-weapons capability, the Islamic regime in Iran can be counted on to throw its weight around in far more deadly ways than it has done in the past. Add to that the immediate infusion of around $150 billion in overseas cash reserves — approximately a third of Iran’s gross domestic product — and this deal has spawned far more dangers and a far deadlier threat than exists today with no deal.
The Obama administration announced at the start of these negotiations what a good deal would look like: It would include a halt to all enrichment and the dismantling of Iran’s heavy water plutonium-producing reactor. Instead, this deal not only allows Iran to continue enriching and to “modernize” the heavy water reactor, it commits the United States and its partners to transferring nuclear technology to Iran and worse, to defending Iran in the event another power (perhaps Israel?) launches a cyber attack against its nuclear infrastructure.
And it gets worse.
The deal grants unconscionable concessions, apparently won by Iran at the 11th hour from a secretary of state desperate to come home with any deal, no matter the cost. The United States agreed to lift the international arms embargo on Iran that has been in effect since the 1980s, and to end restrictions of Iran’s ballistic missile program.
Secretary Kerry also agreed to lift sanctions on IRGC and its deadly overseas special operations branch, the Quds Force — the very ones who are killing so many Americans.
In so doing, he explicitly agreed to lift sanctions on former Quds Force commander, Qasem Soleimani — although perhaps Mr. Kerry didn’t realize that’s what he did, or didn’t read Attachment 4 of Article II that spells out in plain English the names of countless murderers the U.S. pledged to remove from Treasury Department black lists.
The United States had a winning hand at the start of negotiations in November 2013. The Islamic regime was reeling from the effect of sanctions, and was acutely aware that continued economic and financial pressure could finally spark the internal revolt against its tyranny it had long feared and violently suppressed. Instead of maintaining the pressure, perhaps with a show of support to the pro-freedom movement, the United States simply discarded its winning cards.
This is not just a bad deal for U.S. national security and for the security of our allies, including Israel. It is a monumentally bad deal, which arose out of no compelling need, making it a gratuitous capitulation to a terrorist regime that never hesitates to enunciate its genocidal intentions.
But the White House has made support for this deal a political litmus test for Democrat party loyalists. Shame on Rep. Chris Van Hollen for proving himself to be just another partisan hack, not a statesman.
Kenneth R. Timmerman was the Republican nominee against Van Hollen in Maryland’s 8th Congressional district in 2012, and is president & CEO of the Foundation for Democracy in Iran, iran.org. Thinking of submitting an op-ed to the Washington Examiner? Be sure to read our guidelines on submissions.
