Recent days have brought good news and bad. We’ve seen policies we’ve long supported advance and seen bipartisan opposition to US capitulation to Iran’s every whim in negotiations over the Islamic Republic’s quest for nuclear weapons. On the other hand, we’ve seen said capitulation continue to serve as the cornerstone of the Biden administration’s foreign policy approach and we saw an Iranian attack on American facilities in Iraq.
The Omnibus Bill Passes Late last week Congress passed the Omnibus spending bill
which funds the government for the remainder of the fiscal year and included a number of key provisions of import to the pro-Israel community. The bill included the annual agreed upon US support for Israel’s military, the supplemental Iron Dome missile defense resupply funding held up for months by Sen. Rand Paul and additional support for Israel’s missile defense program. The bill even restated Americans’ opposition to aiding the Palestinian Authority so long as that entity continues paying people to commit acts of terror. As CUFI Action Fund Chairwoman Sandra Parker put it, “We are grateful to the Congressional leadership in both chambers and from both parties for moving this legislation forward. In addition to the financial support enabling Israel to defend itself and fight shared American and Israeli enemies like Hezbollah this legislation also reiterates the importance of the Taylor Force Act and ensures aid falls within the law.” Congress Express Concerns In more Congressional news, Senate Republicans sent a letter to President Biden on Monday in which they let the leader of the free world know that it would be futile to sign an Iran deal which “provide[s] substantial sanctions relief in exchange for merely short-term limitations on Iran’s nuclear program.”
Well, almost all the Senate Republicans did. Sen. Rand Paul was the lone Republican who did not sign the letter. Anyone seeing a pattern? But we digress… The letter, which nearly all Senate Republicans signed, eloquently warns the President against
making a terrible deal with Iran and yet again lays out what a good, sustainable Iran deal requires. “We would be willing and eager to support an Iran policy that completely blocks Iran’s path to a nuclear weapons capability, constrains Iran’s ballistic missile program, and confronts Iran’s support for terrorism. But if the administration agrees to a deal that fails to achieve these objectives or makes achieving them more difficult, Republicans will do everything in our power to reverse it,” the Senators wrote. Republicans aren’t the only ones concerned with the Biden administration’s reported capitulation to the Islamic Republic. In fact, in recent weeks two members of Biden’s own Iran negotiating team have quit over the direction the talks were going. And Democrats have also expressed concerns about what they’re hearing. Will President Biden listen? Doesn’t seem likely. In fact, on Tuesday reports came out that the US has assured Russia that sanctions against Moscow for its inhumane invasion of Ukraine will not impact Russia’s ability to do business with Iran under Biden’s Iran nuclear accord. Anyone seeing a pattern? Iran Launches Missiles All of this comes literally days after Iran launched a dozen missiles at Erbil, the capital of the semi-autonomous Kurdish region of Iraq. The missiles were aimed at an area where the US is building a
consulate. Thankfully no one was killed. One Kurdish worker was hurt. There’s no ambiguity about where the missiles came from: Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) took responsibility for the act of war. Currently the IRGC is designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization because, not to put too fine a point on it but the IRGC is the backbone of the Islamic Republic’s international terrorist network. Reports have come out recently that Iran is demanding the IRGC have its terrorist designation removed, and that the Biden administration may do just that. Anyone seeing a pattern? At the end of the day, American weakness continues to embolden the worst actors on the planet. From Moscow to Tehran we are seeing the world remade for the worse as a result of Biden’s policy of appeasement. We’re not holding out hope that the Biden administration will listen to the Republicans, Democrats or even their own (former)
employees who can’t stomach the White House’s weakness. But we are playing close attention to what the President’s co-equal branch of government might do because at this point, only Congress (less Sen. Paul, the Squad and the rest of the Hamas caucus) can save the day. They finally passed the Omnibus bill, maybe they can likewise finally pull American foreign policy from the edge of the cliff.
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