John Kerry, Enemy of Israel
As the Trump years proved, there are a number of options available as we wait for the Iranian regime to come to its senses or, hopefully, crumble, including maximum economic pressure and sabotage. Last week, Israel reportedly blew up Iran’s Natanz nuclear facility’s electrical substation, located 40 to 50 meters underground, damaging “thousands of centrifuges.” This is likely the second time in the past few months that the Israelis have been able to smuggle explosives into the facility and detonate them remotely. Of course, this incident is only one in a long line of unexplained fires, assassinations, and computer worms that have caused substantial delays and damage to the illegal Iranian nuclear-weapons program. All of these efforts have likely saved lives by delaying the ability of Iran to become another North Korea — or worse, since Iran exports terror all over the world.John Kerry is skirting the line of treason with Iran
During the Obama years, Democrats would offer an ugly false choice: You either support diplomacy with the “moderate” wing of the theocratic state, or you endorse “war”; either fly unmarked euros in tonnage and bail out the Mullahs, or plunge America into another Iraq War. At one point, Obama claimed that the Republican caucus was making “common cause” with Iranian hard-liners.
The opposite was true. In the leaked audio from Zarif, we hear that the military and theocratic forces in the nation “call the shots” and overrule “government decisions and ignoring advice.” According to the Times, Zarif says that the political wing is “severely constricted” and decisions “are dictated by the supreme leader or Revolutionary Guards Corps.” Obama’s contention that the Iran deal was being forged with the “moderate faction” was always a fantasy.
The real moderates in Iran were forsaken by Obama and Biden when they decided that the United States wouldn’t support the 2009 Green Movement, in what Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky called one of the biggest failures of human rights in modern history. Democrats Murphy, Biden, and Kerry are more interested in ensuring Iran becomes a regional counterforce to Israeli power.
Whatever you believe about the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or Biden’s iteration of the deal, it should not have to be said that high-ranking United States officials shouldn’t be sharing sensitive information about an ally with a terror regime. Yet it also seems quite likely that’s exactly what John Kerry did.
The rather curious defining feature of Democratic Party foreign policy, going back at least four decades, is that our friends must be bullied and our enemies must be appeased. The Democratic worldview holds that America is a source of geopolitical evil whose destructive influences must be tamed and reined in, and that America’s enemies must be emboldened in order to tilt the global playing field away from America’s noxious ambit.
Barack Obama’s administration encapsulated this toxic ideology through its single-minded pursuit of a nuclear accord with the world’s No. 1 state sponsor of terrorism during the president’s lame-duck second term. Many of the leading hucksters who comprised Team Obama’s “negotiators” with Tehran — Wendy Sherman, Robert Malley, and Colin Kahl among them — are now reprising their roles during Uncle Joe Biden’s third Obama term.
No individual personified the Obama Bros’ supine tango with the mullahs better than then-Secretary of State John Kerry. Kerry, the “statesman” who has been on the wrong side of every major foreign affairs issue since at least the Swift Boats of Vietnam, betrayed his country in borderline-treasonous fashion as Obama’s chief diplomatic lackey. Not content to sell the farm — and scores of unmarked pallets of U.S. taxpayer cash — to a mullocracy with untold American blood on its hands as a diplomat, Kerry then traitorously colluded as a layman with his pal, Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif, to undermine the Trump administration’s “maximum pressure” Iran containment strategy.
Alas, we now know it is apparently even worse. New leaked audio appears to reveal that Kerry, now Team Biden’s special climate envoy, divulged to Zarif the details of over 200 clandestine Israeli military operations taken against Iranian targets in Syria. One might be loath to take on blind faith the claims of a thug like Zarif, but in this case the shoe fits. This is who John Forbes Kerry is — who he always has been, and always will be.
Seth Frantzman: John Kerry, the latest victim of Zarif’s big mouth - Analysis
The BBC reported in 2015 that Iran was quietly deepening involvement in Syria. Zarif says he didn’t know about Iran’s role. Didn’t he read the BBC? Is he the most uninformed foreign minister in the world?
Or is he up to some game, trying to pretend he didn’t know as a way to get some benefit? What might Zarif receive if he can claim he didn’t know about Iran’s role in Syria? He can make it seem like deals he negotiates are being “violated” by other elements in Iran. He can perhaps prepare himself for a post-ministerial career.
Zarif’s comments remind one of the scene in the film Casablanca when Captain Renault is “shocked” to find gambling taking place in a café that he himself gambles in. Zarif is shocked to find out that there are Iranians in Syria and claims that Kerry told him about airstrikes. Which is more reasonable: that the Iranian foreign minister learns of Israeli airstrikes from the former US secretary of state, rather than read media reports, or that he simply wants to convey something about his relationship with Kerry?
KERRY HAS a long history of being close to the Iranian regime. This goes back to Davos in 2007 and likely before. He wanted to radically re-orient US policy in the region to work with Iran. His goal in this was likely to achieve some fame for himself as the person that brought Iran in from the cold.
The US worked hard on the Iran Deal, in part because it was such a sunk cost and the US needed a diplomatic win. Kerry fronted that win. Without the Iran deal, which the US begged for at the time, there would be little to show for the efforts to work with the Islamic Republic.
The US narrative at the time was that there would be “war” if there was no deal. In reality, there was no war, which was revealed when the Trump administration walked away from the deal. Iran also wasn’t blocked from uranium enrichment; it openly enriches uranium in violation of the deal while the other signatories beg Tehran to stop.
Kerry and Zarif cultivated a relationship in which they would help one another, ostensibly confronting “hardliners” back home in both of their societies. It was a symbiotic relationship: They would rise and fall together.
The leaked tape has embarrassed Kerry, which resulted in his denials. It’s not clear how it will impact Zarif. He was already distrusted at home, and now it’s not clear if he can be trusted abroad to further Iran’s aims if he paints himself as ignorant of Iran’s own policies – although this may work in his favor because he can continue to be the cherubic face of Iran’s regime.