Israelis Unanimous: The MoU Is a ‘Catastrophic Capitulation’
No one in Israel expected President Donald Trump’s betrayal, accompanied by his coarse-mouthed dressing-down of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The incompetence of Trump and his negotiators is now there for all to see. With sanctions lifted, Iran can now sell its oil, and the revenues from those sales are enough to pay for the country’s entire annual budget. Iran will now receive, in addition, tens of billions of dollars from the assets soon to be unfrozen.
And finally, Trump has committed our government to helping raise $300 billion from private parties to invest in Iran which, if successful, will give Iran enough money to build a vast conventional armory that will make it the undisputed hegemon in the region. The MoU says nothing about Iran’s ballistic missiles; apparently they are not going to be limited, because Trump said that it “would be a little unfair” to prevent Iran from having them, because Saudi Arabia has them. Of course, wouldn’t it also be ”a little unfair” to prevent Iran from having nuclear weapons because Israel has them?
More on how Israelis have reacted to the MoU can be found here:
Israel, Stunned by Trump’s Iran Deal, Sees It as
a ‘Catastrophic Capitulation’
bDavid M. Halbfinger, New York Times,
Israel awoke to a frightening new reality on Thursday as it absorbed, with disbelief and largely in silence, the terms of President Trump’s preliminary agreement to end the war with Iran.
It accomplishes none of Israel’s war aims, analysts and officials said, and arguably leaves the country in worse shape on each of them….
The hundreds of billions of dollars that Iran may receive in sanctions relief, unfrozen assets, or reconstruction aid could wind up funding more missiles in Iran and aiding Tehran’s militia allies around the Middle East….
The Iranian government has already promised Hezbollah that it will be sending the terror group more money as soon as the unfrozen assets are received in Tehran.
On Wednesday at the Group of 7 summit in France, the president had again spoken of Netanyahu with disdain, suggesting he was excitable and prone to overreacting to Hezbollah’s attacks. He belittled him publicly as the “very small partner” in the relationship and saying that Israel would have been annihilated if it had not been for him.
Who would have “annihilated” Israel had it not been for Donald Trump’s support? Israel battered Iran quite successfully on its own in the war that began on February 28. Israel has, by assassinating Iranian nuclear scientists and sabotaging Iran’s uranium-enriching centrifuges at Natanz through its malware known as Stuxnet, constantly managed to put stumbling blocks in the way of Iran’s nuclear program. Israel welcomed, but did not need, American participation in the war with Iran that began on February 28.
Every Israeli, from right to left, agrees with David Horovitz, editor of the Jerusalem Post, that Trump’s deal with Iran is a “catastrophic capitulation.” And to make matters still worse, the Administration is treating Israel — see J.D. Vance’s astonishing speech — as an ingrate, because “without the U.S.,” according to Donald Trump, Israel would have been ”annihilated.” And therefore, when Trump tells Israel to stop attacking Hezbollah, as Iran demands, Israel should do so… or else.
It's interesting how Trump seems to have stepped right back and handed this portfolio over to Vance. Is it because he figured Vance could do a better job of managing Iran, or could it possibly be that Trump wants to blame the failure on someone else? Could it be that Trump has figured out that his bullying tactics don't work on Islam and he has no plan B?
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Iran Got Everything It Wanted.
All We Got Was the Strait (Maybe).
And administration figures need to stop lying about it.
There’s certainly plenty of ‘misinformation’ about it.
After being told for days that the version floating around the media wasn’t the real MOU in official statements, it turned out for the most part to be the real deal. The agreement includes dropping sanctions, $300 billion for Iran (the current hedge is that the money will be coming from ‘investors’, not the government) and no meaningful Iranian comments except to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.
The MOU is a litany of Iranian demands and American commitments with no Iranian commitments except to reopen the Strait. Anyone can look at the wording and see that clearly for themselves.
There’s no other way to view this except that Iran shook down our government into dropping sanctions and pretty much everything else by closing the strait. It’s an unquestionable defeat.
Tactically speaking that already makes it worse than the Obama deal.
But the Iranians are sharp negotiators and we had no one repping us in the negotiations, just Steven Witkoff, who was there repping Qatar which means that, much as in the Kerry era, ‘our negotiators’ were really the enemy’s negotiators.
The current fallback from defenders of the deal is there’s stuff ‘we don’t know’ . And there apparently is because Vance admitted that much like the Obama Iran deal, there are secret side deals in place.
J.D. Vance is being very cute by calling them “gentleman’s agreements”. That assumes Islamic Jihadists who captured and tortured Americans and chant “Death to America” are gentlemen.
What are those side deals? Once again we’re not being told. I’ll make the same point that I made during the Obama Iran Deal, our government isn’t hiding this information from the Iranian, who already know what’s in those agreements, it’s hiding the information from us.
The same folks who lied to us about the MOU are now hiding the side deals.
Now the next step is that after Iran rolled us on the MOU, the expectation is that the $300 billion and the sanctions relief will act as leverage to get Iran to agree not to develop nuclear weapons and to live in peace with everyone else.
That’s a fantasy up there with the Taliban deal and will end the same way.
Long before that however Iran will be extracting as much as it can, not just financially, but by escalating the fighting in Lebanon, while pressuring the Trump administration to force Israel not to respond. This, as I’ve described before, is how terrorists negotiate, by taking the negotiations hostage.
The good news, as I’ve said before, is that Trump, unlike Obama, isn’t ideologically committed to this garbage, and can change his mind, and has made this move largely because of oil prices. That’s a political tactic and it’s still early in the administration. The administration has the right to make the case for the deal, but politicians like J.D. Vance should be honest about it, show Americans what’s in the deal and stop lashing out at everyone who correctly notes that it’s a one-sided win for Iran.
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