“This
isn’t a helpful way of talking about America’s Iran policy, and it needs to
stop.”
The US did not pay a $400 million “ransom” to
Iran. Here’s what actually happened. *see explanation below
This dumb controversy is everything wrong with our Iran debate.Updated by Zack Beauchamp on August 4, 2016, 2:30 p.m. ET @zackbeauchamp
On the morning of January 17, several wooden pallets arrived at Tehran’s Mehrabad airport. The unassuming pallets were stuffed with foreign cash — $400 million worth, to be exact. Their origin point? The United States.
That same day,
four US citizens detained by Iran were released from Iranian custody.
These facts,
uncovered in a recent Wall Street
Journal piece, have set off a major firestorm inside the United
States. Republicans and conservatives, including Paul Ryan and Donald Trump,
have alleged that the payment was part of secret ransom deal the Obama
administration made with Iran to free the prisoners.
"If true,
this report confirms our longstanding suspicion that the administration paid a
ransom in exchange for Americans unjustly detained in Iran," Ryan’s
outraged statement read. "It would also mark another chapter in the
ongoing saga of misleading the American people to sell this dangerous nuclear
deal."
It’s easy to
see how the timing is suspicious. But Ryan, Trump, and other critics have the
facts wrong. The Wall Street Journal story is actually describing a payment
that President Obama
announced back in January. What’s more, the payment was the result
of a 35-year case in international court — and had nothing to do with any
"hostage" payments.
Once you
understand these facts, you will understand that this isn’t actually a story
about the Obama administration paying a secret ransom to Iran. It’s a story
about the way Washington’s debate over Iran is fundamentally broken.
What literally
happened
Almost
immediately after the $1.7 billion deal was announced, critics began suggesting
that all was not as it seemed. The timing of the decades-old weapons payment
settlement and the hostage release suggested that it wasn’t just a settlement
on a legal issue — it was a ransom payment.
"A deal
that sent $1.7 billion in U.S. funds to Iran, announced alongside the freeing
of five Americans from Iranian jails, has emerged as a new flashpoint amid a
claim in Tehran that the transaction amounted to a ransom payment," the Wall Street
Journal’s Jay Solomon, who also co-wrote the recent piece that broke
the $400 million payment story, reported at the time.
But there was
no direct evidence to back up this theory. The speculation about timing was
just that — speculation.
Moreover, the
basic logic of it didn’t make any sense. Iran was going to get that money back
no matter what through the arbitration process — probably more, if the Obama
administration was right. Why would it release potentially valuable hostages in
exchange for money it would have gotten otherwise? Iran would have to be the
world’s dumbest hostage taker.
The August
Wall Street Journal piece, written by Solomon and Carol Lee, attempted to
resolve these questions. It uncovered that the first $400 million payment,
which was part of the $1.7 billion total settlement, happened on the same day
as the hostage release — and that the Obama administration clearly chose not to
include that particular fact in its announcement back in January.
That’s
suggestive of a link between the hostage negotiations and the weapons
settlement, but it’s hardly conclusive.
Beyond that,
the WSJ report contained two real pieces of evidence suggesting that the arms
deal payment was actually ransom.
First, Iranian
negotiators involved in the prisoner exchange allegedly linked the two:
"US officials also acknowledge that Iranian negotiators on the prisoner
exchange said they wanted the cash to show they had gained something
tangible," Solomon and Lee report.
But the
Iranian negotiators on the prisoner exchange were not the
same negotiators involved in the weapons deal settlement. Therefore,
they couldn’t make demands of the US team negotiating the weapons deal
settlement, which means they couldn’t negotiate a quid pro quo of money for
hostage release, the definition of a ransom.
So even if
this report is true — and you should always be skeptical of anonymous unquoted
references to "US officials" — the Iranians would have gotten the
money no matter what.
The second
piece of evidence for the payment being a ransom is that the Iranians spun it
that way. "Iranian press reports have quoted senior Iranian defense
officials describing the cash as a ransom payment," write Solomon and
Lee.
But of
course Iranian officials would spin it as a hostage payment. This makes them
look strong to their domestic audience and America look weak. We don’t take
political spin from American officials at face value, so we shouldn’t take
Iranian spin at face value either — especially when it’s contradicted by
independent evidence.
One could make
the argument, I suppose, that the timing was a form of ransom. By
delivering the payment on the same day as the prisoner release, Iranian
officials could claim that they got the money as part of a ransom deal.
But the truth
is that the Iranians could have claimed that no matter when the cash was
delivered. If the Obama administration had forked over $400 million six months
later, those same Iranian defense officials could have lied and said it was
part of the prisoner release deal rather than the weapons settlement.
The lie isn’t
significantly more credible just because the cash was delivered on the same
day. Nor should American media and politicians help validate the Iranian lie by
treating Iranian propaganda as actual evidence.
The bottom
line, then, is that the new Wall Street Journal piece uncovers no real evidence
suggesting that the US agreed to give Iran money that it wouldn’t have
gotten otherwise as part of the hostage release deal. There’s smoke here,
but no fire.
This shows how
our Iran debate is broken
There’s a
bigger problem here, one that goes well beyond a hyperbolic reaction to one
Wall Street Journal story. Because this isn’t really about one cash payment to
Iran — it’s about the fundamentally broken way we talk about Iran.
Every debate
about Iran in Washington nowadays is really a debate about the Iran nuclear
deal.
Basically, one
camp says the US should welcome a settlement that defuses tensions with Iran on
this one specific issue, while the other sees Iran as a fundamentally hostile
actor that cannot — and should not — be compromised with.
That second
camp sees the deal as a huge step toward the US accommodating Iran more broadly
in the Middle East, which they believe would be a disaster of epic proportions.
So they campaign, relentlessly, to undermine the nuclear deal — with the
support of most of the Republican Party.
Indira
Lakshmanan has a revealing story in Politico
on the "plan to undo the Iranian nuclear deal" by preventing Iran
from reentering the global economy, and the "constellation of pressure
groups, analysts, lobbyists and lawmakers" who are hard at work trying to
make it happen.
The problem,
though, is that the nuclear deal is actually working pretty well.
When you talk
to technical experts, they tell you that Iran is abiding by the deal’s terms.
The Iranians have cut down on the number of centrifuges, limited their
stockpile of enriched uranium, and done many other things that have made it
much harder for them to build a nuclear bomb.
"I think
it's gone very well," Jeffrey Lewis, director of the East Asia
Nonproliferation Program at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies
at Monterey, told me
last month. "The [International Atomic Energy Agency] has been regularly
reporting on Iran's compliance, and Iran is complying with the deal."
This creates a
major problem for team anti-deal. They need evidence that the deal isn’t
working and should be undone, but the facts about the deal’s core provisions
don’t support that. The result is an endless deluge of spin. Every new piece of
information on Iran or the nuclear deal becomes evidence that Iran is evil or
cannot be trusted.
Since the
deal, there’s been a slew of bad-sounding stories being spun wildly to
construct a narrative of a broken nuclear deal and an Obama administration kowtowing
to Iran. A few examples:
An AP story
that allegedly showed Iran would "self-inspect" Parchin, a military
complex, turned out to be describing standard
operating procedure when it came to nuclear inspections.
A report from
German intelligence suggesting Iran was buying nuclear material was hyped as
evidence that Iran can’t be trusted. Turns out the report only covered the
year 2015 — before the nuclear deal came into effect.
Claims that
Iran had broken the deal by stockpiling too much heavy water
ignored the fact that there wasn’t an actual
hard cap on heavy water in the Iran deal, and that Iran very quickly
shipped out its excess heavy water.
These stories
are all highly technical: In order to understand the truth, you need to know a
fair amount about how nuclear inspections work or the terms of the nuclear
deal. Without that knowledge, it’s easy to see a pattern of Iranian malfeasance
and violation of the terms of the deal — which is exactly the story deal
critics are trying to tell.
This most
recent controversy over the alleged "hostage" payment fits this
pattern perfectly. The truth of the situation is highly technical and boring;
nobody cares about a 35-year-old international litigation process. And a
surface-level look at the facts — the US delivered $400 million in secret
cash on the same day Iran released US prisoners — confirms the narrative
of the Obama administration making absurd concessions to Iran.
Yet when boring
facts meet exciting spin, exciting spin often wins out. So you’ve got Mark Dubowitz,
the executive director of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and one
of the leaders of the effort to torpedo the deal, claiming that the entire $1.7
billion was a big ransom
payment.
If you weren’t
following this debate very closely, you wouldn’t know why he was wrong. You
would conclude that the US has "once again" made embarrassing
concessions to Iran — a point that Republicans, deal critics, and Obama
opponents are only too happy to amplify.
I’m not trying
to say the Iranians are innocent little lambs. Iran is most certainly a very,
very bad actor — it is spreading sectarian violence in Iraq (and elsewhere),
funding anti-Israel terrorist groups, and devoting tremendous military
resources to propping up Bashar al-Assad’s murderous regime in Syria. The
nuclear deal hasn’t made Iran into a force for stability, as some deal
proponents in the Obama administration hoped, and it probably won’t.
These are
real, serious foreign policy problems for the United States. But when our Iran
debate focuses on misleading nuclear inspection minutiae or whether the Obama
administration is "kowtowing" to Iran with things like the alleged
hostage payment, we aren’t having a serious conversation about how to address
Iran’s actually bad policies.
Instead, we’re
debating an endless drumbeat of misleading stories designed only to undermine
the nuclear deal and faith in the Obama administration’s negotiating prowess.
The ransom faux scandal is only the latest such story in this pattern.
This isn’t a
helpful way of talking about America’s Iran policy, and it needs to stop.
___________________________
I have some liberal friends that adore Hillary Clinton but they cannot give me one good reason why they like her so much... Why is that?
They cannot even name one thing in her entire political career that has benefitted America... Why is that?
Some of them go to church and even recite the Rosary even though their political platform done away with all references to God yet they still vote for the Godless. Why is that?
Hillary has even stated (I'm paraphrasing) that we must get rid of all religious codes that define right and wrong. Her emphasis during that speech was that she would decide what's right or wrong... Why would anyone want to vote for a would be dictator? Oh well, liberal logic has no rationale thought and ...and why is that?
Meanwhile here's a video of Anderson Cooper caught covering up (Actually lying!) for Hillary Clinton... Why is that?
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