Complicit in depravity

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.