Obama's deal with Iran has been a disaster and will likely get worse

Tablet:

“Since the Obama administration and its negotiating partners struck the deal with Iran in July 2015,” Joshua Keating recently wrote in Slate, “the Middle East’s sectarian conflicts have only become deeper, more violent, and more intractable. From the half-million people killed in Syria to the rise of ISIS to the massive refugee crisis that has strained the world’s humanitarian capacity to its breaking point and contributed to the rise of right-wing populists in the West, it’s much harder now to say that Obama made the right decision in prioritizing the Iran deal above all else.”

No one who has been reading Tablet even casually over the past four years can be surprised to learn that Barack Obama’s signature foreign-policy initiative wasn’t just an arms agreement. It was an instrument used to rebalance U.S. interests, downgrading traditional allies like Israel, as well as Saudi Arabia, and upgrading Iran. The hope, Obama told an interviewer, was to create a geopolitical “equilibrium … in which there’s competition, perhaps suspicion, but not an active or proxy warfare.” Given the poverty of that hope, it should hardly come as a surprise that instead of the airy and ever-elusive notion of “geopolitical equilibrium” there is instead mayhem.

Yet Keating’s candid assessment is newsworthy because it comes from a writer who previously advocated for the JCPOA. As evidence he may have been wrong, Keating lists several examples of regional chaos—like the war in Yemen with civilians caught between Iranian proxies and Saudi forces. His change of heart, he explains, is also partly inspired by a confession made by White House aide Ben Rhodes in the recently released documentary about Obama’s foreign-policy team throughout 2016, The Final Year. Rhodes, writes Keating, acknowledges “that Obama’s reluctance to intervene to a greater extent in Syria was motivated in part by the desire to achieve the nuclear agreement with Bashar al-Assad’s patron, Iran.”

Keating now thinks that was a bad decision. “Looking at the devastating consequences of the Syrian war, not just for that country but for the region and the world, it’s hard not to argue that Obama should have made Syria his main and overwhelming foreign-policy focus, to the exclusion of nearly everything else, Iran deal be damned.”

Still, Keating’s article must have come as a surprise to colleagues who, while perhaps no less aware of the current reality in the Middle East, would scarcely dare to reassess their advocacy of the Iran deal in print, even with Ben Rhodes’ permission. One response to Keating’s article shows why. “A smart reflection,” tweeted Washington Post foreign-affairs writer Ishaan Tharoor, “shorn of the neocon demagoguery and hysteria of the usual suspects.”

That is, the argument that Keating makes is wrong when it comes from overly emotional people who are driven by suspect loyalties. But Keating is one of ours, not some “neocon” demagogue.

The name-calling sheds light on the true nature of the Iran-deal debate, which started with Obama’s second term and continues well into Trump’s first. As it turns out, for many participants, whether in the press, Washington think tanks, or even the pro-Israel community, the debate was never about the quality of argument or evidence, or the likely impact of the policies being debated. No, the Iran deal was a form of virtue-signaling that used the lives of tens of millions of people living in the Middle East as props—and whose favorite hate-word was “neocon,” a word that was enthusiastically applied to people of widely varying political leanings and stripes, especially if they were Jewish.
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 The deal never made any sense to me.  Why would you trust people who hate you and wish your death and the death of millions of others who do not accept their weird religious beliefs?  Iran is run by genocidal Islamic religious bigots.  They openly admit it.  They want everyone in the world who does not accept their version of Islam to die.  What part of Death to America and Death to Israel is difficult to comprehend.  They also believe that it is OK to lie to achieve their objectives, so why should you trust them in any deal?

Since the deal was consummated they have spent most of the windfall from Obama on propping up their proxies they use for achieving their objectives.

Trump is also questioning why there has been no investigation of Obama's turning over of roughly $1.7 billion to Iran.

Iran seems to see the deal as a green light for continuing their terrorist operation and is complaining that the US is not helping them get more business.