Complicit in depravity

If true, the Biden team’s reported grovelling to Tehran is beyond shocking

By Melanie Phillips   Apr 17

The Battle of Israel and Amalek; Luca Giordano, 1634-1705

I have written many times — as here, here, and here — about the astonishing desperation of the Biden administration to make a deal with Iran over its nuclear programme.

If the Obama administration had some of us scratching our heads in horror over its 2015 deal which guaranteed an Iranian path to nuclear weapons with at best only a few years’ delay, the successor deal on the verge of being agreed by the Biden team was shaping up to be very much worse.

This would reportedly not only guarantee an Iranian nuclear bomb within a much shorter timescale, not only funnel tens of billions of dollars in sanctions relief into the coffers of a US-designated terrorist state already responsible for killing scores of Americans and other westerners, but even worse was poised to lift the designation of “Foreign Terrorist Organisation” from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Iran’s de facto army that’s responsible for countless global atrocities.

At the last hurdle, however, progress towards a deal recently ground to a halt. With even some Democrats in the US Congress as well as otherwise lily-livered western countries expressing consternation and disbelief that America might be about to give an effective green light to the IRGC, this suddenly seemed to become a sticking point for the Biden team, too. Suddenly, the US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said he was “not overly optimistic” it would be concluded.

Here, however, is where an already deeply troubling and scarcely believable US policy becomes simply depraved. As Andrew Parasiliti and Elizabeth Hagedorn reported earlier this month on Al Monitor:

The Biden administration was ready to de-list the IRGC if Iran would agree not to target Americans implicated in the killing of IRGC-Quds Force commander  Qasem Soleimani by a US armed drone in January 2020.

• The US Justice Department is reportedly investigating an IRGC plot to kill former US national security adviser John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
• “It is politically impossible for the Iranians to publicly close the file on taking revenge for Soleimani,” Ali Vaez of the International Crisis Group told Al-Monitor. “That proposal has been rejected by the Iranians. Iran has come up with a counterproposal that the US is now considering [my emphasis]”.

Just consider the implications of this. The killing of Soleimani was a welcome and long overdue lethal counter-strike by the US against the man who had the blood of countless Americans and others on his hands and who was the Iranian regime’s most important strategist of mass murder.

Yet instead of making good on this tardy defence of the west by doubling down on such counter-strikes, the Biden team proceeded to grovel before the godfathers of terror in Tehran in a sordid plea for protection against reprisals for Soleimani’s killing, in exchange for giving a free pass to to the terrorist army he had commanded — thus putting the lives of countless more innocents at risk from IRGC atrocities.

Worse still, the Biden team is apparently “now considering” an Iranian proposal that would enable the regime not to “publicly close the file on taking revenge for Soleimani”. It would appear from this that the Biden team is “now considering” agreeing to an Iranian proposal to take some kind of revenge on the US. And this despite the IRGC plot to murder Bolton and Pompeo.

If this seems too grotesque to be credible, consider this in Tablet from Lee Smith, who writes:

This is not the first time the Iranians have plotted to kill their enemies in the US capital. In September 2011, US law enforcement arrested Manssor Arbabsiar, an Iranian-born naturalised US citizen who, together with Iran-based Quds Force officers, had plotted to kill Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the United States Adel al-Jubeir at a Washington restaurant and subsequently bomb the Saudi and Israeli embassies.

At the time, President Barack Obama said that Iran “will pay a price” for plotting terror attacks that were likely to have killed a huge number of people in the US capital. Instead, the Obama administration legalised Iran’s nuclear weapons program when it agreed to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action in July 2015.

The Biden administration is now negotiating to re-enter the deal that the Trump administration withdrew from in May 2018. Despite some recent hand-wringing, it seems unlikely that Iran’s efforts to kill Americans will derail Biden’s negotiators. The Obama team eagerly embraced the Iranian nuclear program while ignoring Tehran’s terror plots and will almost certainly do so again under Biden. Robert Malley, the key negotiator for Obama’s Middle East team, now serves as Biden’s Iran envoy.

Moreover, recently released court filings and press reports suggest that two US citizens, Arian Taherzadeh and Haider Ali who were arrested in Washington DC earlier this month, might have been part of an Iranian assassination team whose mission was to kill former high-ranking US officials.

The two were arrested for impersonating federal agents. Pretending to be agents from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), they provided Secret Service agents with rent-free apartments, iPhones, surveillance systems, a drone, a flat-screen television, a generator, and what they said were “official government vehicles”. They also proposed buying an assault rifle for a Secret Service agent assigned to First Lady Jill Biden.

As Smith writes:

It seems odd that these actions barely raised the suspicions of the numerous federal agents living in the building… Taherzadeh and Ali’s stunning imposture was finally revealed by a US Postal Service inspector who was investigating an attack on a postal carrier in the Navy Yard building and was told by residents that the two men might have witnessed the assault…

How is it possible that in a building full of federal law enforcement agents, it took a postal service inspector to uncover the two men? After all, press reports have suggested for months that the FBI and US intelligence agencies are aware of active foreign plots against US officials. In particular, the Iranians are intent on taking revenge for the targeted assassination of Qassem Soleimani, the onetime chief of the Quds Force, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps’ external operations unit, who was second in command only to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

And how is it possible that, despite all this, the Biden administration is pulling out all the stops to conclude a deal that will further hugely empower the terrorist and fanatically anti-west regime in Tehran? As Smith writes:

In other words, rather than walking away from the deal with a terror state that is actively trying to murder former US officials, the Biden administration has been trying to arrive at a formula that licenses Iranian vengeance against its predecessors in government.

The only way to describe this is, as Smith suggests, depraved. It’s what happens when wicked people lure others with no courage and even less moral sense down the rabbit hole of wishful thinking. They end up becoming complicit in depravity. And this is now the trajectory that America, the ostensible leader of the free world, is now on.