What is Biden Doing?
Whatever happened to the Iran Deal? You know, the historic agreement that the Obama administration negotiated back in 2015, despite Republicans, some fellow Democrats, and Israel trying to torpedo it? The Trump administration violated it, but Biden repeatedly said he wanted to rejoin the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) if he ended up becoming president.
Well, now he’s president and suddenly things aren’t so clear. David Klion has a great piece at Jewish Currents on growing progressive anxiety over this issue. “Biden’s team has dawdled, insisting that Tehran take the first steps toward complying with the agreement even though the US withdrew when Iran was cooperating,” writes Klion. “In the meantime, the administration has created new obstacles to diplomacy.”
Klion cites the February 26th Syria strike as one of those obstacles. “The Syria strikes were disheartening, to say the least,” Win Without War’s Erica Fein told him. “Syria is not a place that should be used to send messages back and forth between Iranian-backed proxies and the United States. You can’t bomb your way to peace.”
During a four-hour hearing with the House Foreign Affairs Committee this week, Secretary of State Tony Blinken assured its members that Biden wouldn’t be making any concessions, or lifting sanctions, until Iran reverts back to the rules of the original deal. “Iranians have, unfortunately, moved further and further away from their own compliance,” said Blinken at one point.
Let’s step back for a moment. Here’s Iran, which has been the target of U.S. aggression for decades. I don’t have to run through the public record for you. The C.I.A. overthrew their government via a coup in 1953, gave Iraq chemical weapons that were used against them, shot down a civilian Iranian airliner with 66 children on it, among a variety of additional horrors. U.S politicians regularly threaten to pulverize the country with a military strike. The former president did so over Twitter and a former presidential candidate (and late hero of the “Never Trump Republican” clique) even sang a song about doing so. This isn’t even to mention anything that Israel has done to the country through the years, with full assistance from the United States. You know the history.
In 2015, Iran agreed to cut its low-enriched uranium stockpile by 98% in exchange for sanction relief. The United States violated the deal, ramped up sanctions amid a global pandemic, and now Biden is bombing countries in an effort to send the country a message.
“On Iran, negotiation is always best from a position of strength,” Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX) told Blinken during the hearing. “I don’t trust the Ayatollah, I don’t know how you can possibly negotiate with the Ayatollah.”
I don’t know how, indeed.
Dems Try to Sink Deal
Once again, a number of Democrats are seemingly working to impede the deal. Back in December, 150 House Democrats sent a letter to Biden calling on him to rejoin the deal without conditions. A new letter comes in direct response to that suggestion.
The new letter (which was signed by 70 Republican and 70 Democratic House members) outlines a number of conditions that Iran should abide by before Biden negotiates. “Despite everything you see, there is bipartisanship going on in DC, even over something as contentious as the Iran deal,” said Rep. Mike Waltz (R-FL). “We’re thrilled to have been able to come together on a number of these points… encouraging the administration to encompass all of Iran’s malign behavior.”
Waltz also praised Democrats for taking a more hawkish stand. “The important thing from this letter is that we’re seeing 70 Democrats on the record to the administration saying that we need to have all of these pieces on the table for a future deal,” he explained. “We did not want to leave the only thing out there from Congress — and many Democrats did not want to leave as the only thing out there from the House — the letter in December that just said blindly get back into the JCPOA.”
Now there’s a House resolution (being led primarily by Democrats) to condemn Iranian’s nuclear program. The resolution was introduced by Rep. Elaine Luria (D-VA). “Iran is a state-sponsor of terrorism and poses an existential threat to our national security and Israel, America’s strongest ally in the region,” she said in a statement. “Iran cannot be allowed to continue to progress towards a nuclear weapon and the United States must unequivocally condemn their provocations.”
At least during the Obama administration, you knew that this kind of stuff was designed to stop an actual policy. It remains unclear what the Biden administration is even trying to do this time around.
Odds & Ends
?? The C.I.A. set up an air base in Niger three years ago and it continues to expand. The New York Times reports, “New satellite imagery shows that the air base in Dirkou, Niger, has grown significantly since The New York Times first reported the C.I.A. operations there in 2018, to include a much longer runway and increased security. The new imagery also shows for the first time what appears to be an MQ-9 Reaper drone taxiing to or from a clamshell hangar. The Times previously observed what was most likely a U-28A, an aircraft often used to support Special Operations Forces.”
?? Utah has become the 32nd state to pass an anti-BDS law. The Governor is expected to sign it.
?? Quincy Institute senior research fellow Jessica J. Lee has a piece at The Diplomat on the Enhancing North Korea Humanitarian Assistance Act, which was introduced by Senator Ed Markey (D-MA) and Rep. Andy Levin (D-MI). “The Markey-Levin bill is a common sense proposal to fix a byzantine and flawed process that makes legitimate humanitarian activities in North Korea extremely difficult,” writes Lee. “But the bill also points to an uncomfortable truth: Sanctions have become a tool of a political theater more than an element of a comprehensive strategy.”
? UCLA’s student government passed a resolution for the school to divest its endowment from the Israeli occupation, the prison industrial complex, the militarization of the border, and U.S. imperialism. Pro-Israel groups claim that students were tricked into voting for the resolution.
“We had no idea this resolution was coming up, and were not alerted by anyone ahead of time,” the president of Bruins for Israel Public Affairs Committee at UCLA, told the Jewish Journal. “The language of the resolution was not released ahead of the council meeting, making it impossible for any of the students to speak out on it.”
“My sense is that many of the council members likely didn’t think much about the impact of the resolution,” he added. “Palestine was listed among many other conflicts, and with a general consensus that ‘war’ is a bad thing, they weren’t going to oppose it, especially at these meetings that can run many hours long.”
Are we sure that’s a general consensus?
? Roger Waters is calling on Stevie Wonder to refuse the Wolf Prize award from Israel.
⚖️ Right-wing, pro-Israel attorney David Abrams is suing UCLA in an attempt to reveal the names of speakers at a 2018 SJP event. Alex Kane breaks the whole thing down at The Intercept. “The case also serves as a stark reminder of what often gets ignored amid the national debate over ‘cancel culture’ and free speech,” writes Kane. “Palestinian rights activists are perhaps the most likely to suffer consequences for their political views.”
? Palestine Legal just released its annual year-in-review report. The group responded to “213 incidents of suppression of U.S.-based Palestine advocacy in 2020.” 80% of the incidents that they responded to involved students and scholars that had been targeted on campus. 21 legislative measures targeting Palestinian rights advocacy and BDS were introduced throughout the year. The report also highlights a number of victories.
“Despite all of the attacks against the movement for Palestinian freedom and despite the pandemic placing much of the country on lockdown during 2020, activism for Palestinian rights continued to flourish in the United States,” said staff attorney Zoha Khalili in a statement. You can read the report at Palestine Legal’s website.
Stay safe out there,
Michael
